Expanding window fountain codes with intermediate feedback over BIAWGN channels

Expanding window fountain (EWF) codes use a windowing technique to achieve unequal error protection (UEP) and unequal recovery time. UEP affords significant performance improvement of the more important bits (MIB), but at the cost of performance deterioration of the less important bits (LIB), resulting in poor intermediate performance of the EWF coding. In this study, the authors propose the utilisation of intermediate feedback in EWF coding to terminate the encoding of the MIB after their recovery, with the purpose of enhancing the intermediate performance of EWF codes over binary input additive white Gaussian noise (BIAWGN) channels. The effectiveness of the proposed coding scheme is analysed and evaluated by using extrinsic information transfer functions to investigate the theoretical performance and obtain the closed-form formula of the bit error rate (BER) of the LIB after the intermediate feedback. The results of the theoretical analysis and simulation of the scheme using additive white Gaussian noises with different signal-to-noise ratios reveal an improvement in the BER performance of the LIB compared to the case of conventional EWF coding, and also show that the scheme significantly enhances the intermediate performance of the EWF codes and improves the transmission efficiency.