Design of Systematic Unequal Error Protection Raptor Codes Over Binary Erasure Channels

The third generation partnership project (3GPP) and digital video broadcasting-handheld standards recommend systematic Raptor codes as application-layer forward error correction for reliable transmission of multimedia data. In all previous studies on systematic Raptor codes, equal error protection for all data was considered. However, in many applications, multimedia data requires unequal error protection (UEP) that provides different levels of protection to different parts of multimedia data. In this paper, we propose a new design method for Raptor codes that provide both UEP and systematic properties over binary erasure channels. Numerical results show that the proposed UEP design is effective for reliable multi-level protection.