Digital fountains: a survey and look forward

We survey constructions and applications of digital fountains, an abstraction of erasure coding for network communication. Digital fountains effectively change the standard paradigm where a user receives an ordered stream of packets to one where a user must simply receive enough packets in order to obtain the desired data. Obviating the need for ordered data simplifies data delivery, especially when the data is large or is to be distributed to a large number of users. We also examine barriers to the adoption of digital fountains and discuss whether they can be overcome.