Feedback Strategies for Online Fountain Codes With Limited Feedback

The performance of conventional online fountain codes is feedback dependent. In this letter, an analysis of online fountain codes is conducted to assess their performance under limited feedback conditions. To obtain a feedback point selection scheme with approximately optimal overhead performance when the number of feedbacks is fixed, two heuristic table-look-up strategies are proposed. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategies and verify that the online fountain codes are capable of achieving a nearly comparable full-feedback performance with only partial feedback.