Distributed rateless codes with UEP property

When multiple sources of data need to transmit their rateless coded symbols through a single relay to a common destination, a distributed rateless code instead of several separate conventional rateless codes can be employed to encode the input symbols to increase the transmission efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, we propose distributed rateless codes (DU-rateless) that can provide unequal error protection (UEP) for distributed sources with different data block lengths and different importance levels. We analyze our proposed DU-rateless code employing And-Or tree analysis technique. Next, we design several sets of optimum DU-rateless codes for various setups employing multi-objective genetic algorithms and evaluate their performances.