A packet level FEC code for deep space communications

Abstract

In space communications, some information is more important than others so that it necessitates a unequal error protection (UEP) to provide priority encoding transmission in limited channel capacity. Expanding Window Fountain (EWF) codes is a promising packet level FEC scheme for UEP. However, due to inherit from Fountain codes, its performance becomes very poor when source block size is small. In this work, we propose a novel framework to improve EWF based on the ideal that virtually increase the size of the source block by duplicating the information packets. Extending original packets virtually increase the block size, leading to distinct performance improvement in view of packet erasure rate (PER) with slight increase in complexity.