Digital Fountain Codes with Reduced Latency, Complexity and Buffer Requirements for Wireless Communications

Digital Fountain Codes (DCFs) are proven to be very beneficial in providing reliable, yet flexible solutions in data communications over erasure wireless channels. Their randomness can additionally provide a strong protection against security and privacy risks. However, existing solutions based on DCFs suffer from increased packets, latency, increased decoding complexity, and require very large buffers both at the transmitter and receiver sides. This paper presents a practical solution to overcome most of these issues by exploiting the feedback path. Simulation results suggest significant up to 77% improvement in latency and up to 94% reduction in buffer requirements compared to the existing solutions. Keywords - Digital Fountain Codes, Erasure Channels, Latency, Buffer requirements, Decoding complexity, Security and Privacy.