Fountain codes based on zigzag decodable coding

Fountain codes based on non-binary low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have good decoding performance when the number of source packets is finite. However, the space complexity of the decoding algorithm for fountain codes based on non-binary LDPC codes grows exponentially with the degree of a field extension. Zigzag decodable codes generate the output packets from source packets by using shift and exclusive or. It is known that the zigzag decodable codes are efficiently decoded by the zigzag decoder. In this paper, by applying zigzag decodable coding to fountain codes, we propose a fountain code whose space decoding complexity is nearly equal to that for the Raptor codes. Simulation results show that the proposed fountain coding system outperforms Raptor coding system in terms of the overhead for the received packets.