Design of Finite-Length Precoded EWF Codes for Scalable Video Streaming

Expanding window fountain (EWF) codes, which can provide unequal erasure protection property, are used as an efficient application-layer forward error correction solution for scalable multimedia data transmission over packet networks. Similar to Raptor codes, precoded EWF codes can provide linear coding complexity. However, only when the information length is large, the precoded EWF codes in previous literatures can achieve good performance. In this paper, we carefully investigate how to choose code rates of precodes and degree distributions of EWF codes for different information lengths. Our proposed precoded EWF coding scheme can achieve superior performance compared to the previous scheme for small and moderate information lengths. Simulation results for the scalable video coding extension of the H.264/AVC standard show that, compared with the previous scheme, our proposed scheme requires a smaller reception overhead to recover the base layer.