Short-length rateless codes with unequal error protection property

In some special applications, the importance of different parts of a file to be transmitted such as video or picture is different and the important part (such as the format part) need be given prior protection. This is called unequal error protection (UEP). In this paper we propose a new coding scheme which can provide UEP by cascading new short-length rateless codes with RS codes. In our proposed UEP coding scheme, the decoding success probability of the important data parts are improved by participating in two encoding processes. We theoretically analyzed the decoding failure bound of our UEP coding scheme and confirmed the effectiveness of our method by numerical experiments. Experimental results showed that even the code length is small, our UEP coding scheme can also realize unequal error protection under very small decoding overhead.