Rateless codes with unequal error protection property

In this correspondence, a generalization of rateless codes is proposed. The proposed codes provide unequal error protection (UEP). The asymptotic properties of these codes under the iterative decoding are investigated. Moreover, upper and lower bounds on maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding error probabilities of finite-length LT and Raptor codes for both equal and unequal error protection schemes are derived. Further, our work is verified with simulations. Simulation results indicate that the proposed codes provide desirable UEP. We also note that the UEP property does not impose a considerable drawback on the overall performance of the codes. Moreover, we discuss that the proposed codes can provide unequal recovery time (URT). This means that given a target bit error rate, different parts of information bits can be decoded after receiving different amounts of encoded bits. This implies that the information bits can be recovered in a progressive manner. This URT property may be used for sequential data recovery in video/audio streaming.