An Approach of Eliminating Duplicate Associates in Fountain Codes

Fountain codes are a new type of erasure codes. Because of distinctive coding method, low complexity of implementation, and high reliable transmission, they are particularly promising in practice. In this paper, we discuss the problem of duplicate associates in practical LT codes, which results in the generation of invalid encoding symbols. The reason why it happens is analyzed, and the probability that the problem appears is inferred. Furthermore, we propose an improved algorithm to eliminate the duplicate associates. The simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm presents better performance than the original solution by solving this problem completely.