Overlapped fountain coding for delay-constrained priority-based broadcast applications

In this paper, we propose a new rateless code based on overlapped generations. This proposed scheme works very well especially in a broadcast scenario, where channels with different characteristics are involved in the system. In the proposed scheme, we allow the adjacent generations to overlap. Our main focus is on the design of rateless codes to make any receiver able to recover all the source file with reduction in the overhead and the delay time. Indeed, we show that for several channels characteristics, our proposed scheme outperforms the regular rateless codes such as Luby transform (LT) code. The good advantage of our proposed scheme that it can be used with any kind of degree distributions in the literature and the same improvements are guaranteed.