Incremental Redundancy, Fountain Codes and Advanced Topics

The idea of writing such a technical brief goes back to our days in Quantum corporation, when we were studying efficient coding strategies for cloud storage applications. Having had a thorough review of the literature, I decided to write this document in order to establish a common base ground on which the majority of the relevant research can be analyzed and compared. As far as I am concerned, there is no unified approach that outlines and compares most of the published fountain codes in a single and self-contained framework. This attempt of mine has not only resulted in the review of theoretical fundamentals of efficient coding techniques for incremental redundancy and fountain coding, but also helpedmehave a comprehensive reference document and hopefully for many other graduate students who would like to have some background to pursue a research career regarding fountain codes and their various applications. Some background in coding, graph and probability theory is expected. Although somany different aspects and relevant research studies are deliberately left out, I still hope that this document may serve researchers’ need well. I have also included several exercises for warming the reader up for the material. There are many spots in the text that are product of my coauthors and myself, although some of which have not been published yet. Last but not least, I cannot thank enough Quantum Corporation who provided me and my colleagues “the appropriate playground" to research and leap us forward in knowledge. I cordially welcome any comments, corrections or suggestions. January 7, 2014