A novel unequal error protection algorithm using improved expanding window fountain codes

In the world of multimedia communication, there are lots of scenarios which require a higher protection level for some important data. On the basis of the expanding window fountain (EWF) codes, a new unequal error protection algorithm based on fountain codes is proposed in this paper. The higher priority protection bits are chosen as the input set of the fountain code with degree 1 and a portion of bits with degree 2. The EWF algorithm is still employed to encode the rest bits, which has greater than 2 degree distribution. Our algorithm not only improves the performance of less important bit, at the same time, it also improves the performance of the more important bit. The simulation results show that, compared with the previous expanding window fountain codes, the proposed algorithm can provide a superior unequal error protection.