An introduction to Fountain codes
Dr. Francisco Lazaro
Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)
Fountain codes were originially conceived as an efficient solution to the reliable multicasting problem. A rateless in an embodiment of fountain code accepts k input symbols (bits) at its input and can generate an unlimited amount of coded symbols (redundancy bits). In this lecture we will cover the two best known constructions of rateless codes, LT and Raptor codes. We will consider both iterative (peeling) decoding and maximum likelihood decoding.
Francisco Lázaro was obtained his telecommunication engineering degree form the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in 2006, and his PhD from the Technical University of Hamburg in 2017. From 2007 to 2008 he was working at Rohde & Schwarz as a test engineer. In 2008 he joined the Institute of Communication and Navigation at the German Aerospace Center. His main research interests are rate-less codes and multi-user communications with focus on satellite and space communications.