The design and analysis of unequal error protection fountain coding for multiple source networks over binary erasure channels

A novel network model of multiple source fountain coding is developed and a novel class of generic multiple source fountain codes with unequal error protection(UEP)property is proposed.The And–Or tree analysis technique is generalized to analyze the asymptotic performance of the proposed codes and a joint optimization method employing both linear and nonlinear programs is developed to optimize the degree distributions.Furthermore,we propose three basic methods to achieve UEP property and the performance of each method is discussed.We employ these analytical results and optimization method to design and discuss several UEP codes with two and four sources for different application scenarios.Simulation results verify that the proposed codes can be applied to the networks with any number of sources and can provide strong UEP property in various ways based on the proposed three basic methods.