A new class of rateless codes

Classic rateless codes, such as Raptor codes and LT codes are long codes. But special applications such as multimedia broadcasting and Multicast Server usually require small length codes (a few hundred in size). In response to this demand, we propose a new construction method of small length rateless system codes. The generator matrix of our proposed coding scheme is a special 0-1 random matrix in which every element is valued independently and identically and has same probability to be valued 1. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that, when using maximum likelihood decoding, the rateless code generated by our method can be decoded with extremely high probability under the limitation of both small code length and small decoding overhead.