Round-Robin Overlapping Generations Coding for Fast Content Download

We analyze the download time of a large file, divided into chunks called generations, and transmitted over an erasure channel without feedback. We compare the round-robin and random scheduling policies of coding over generations, and show that round-robin scheduling gives significantly faster file download. We then analyze coding with overlapping generations and show that the optimal overlap size is small compared to the number of generations, which implies that the download time can be reduced with only a small increase in computational complexity. Further, for a given overlap size, we propose overlap structures lower complexity and easy to implement, but still give file download as fast as the best previously proposed structures.