Combined Fountain Code with Network Coding for Error-Tolerant Transmission Network

Network coding can achieve the maximum possible rate defined by the max-flow min-cut theorem through encoding of the input streams at the correlative nodes under the ideal channel condition. When error happens, encoding will bring in error propagation. By introducing redundancies in space domain, network error correction is proposed, however, with the high encoding and decoding complexity. Specifically, fountain code is a rateless code, since the rate varies according to the instant channel state information contrast to the typical fixed-rate code. Based on the fountain code, the error-tolerant network coding scheme is proposed by means of integrating fountain code with network coding at the correlative nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can obtain the lower block error rate (BLER) in butterfly and wireless network, compared with detect and forward scheme. Furthermore, it also reduces the energy consumption at the same time.