Primer and Recent Developments on Fountain Codes

In this paper we survey the various erasure codes which had been proposed and patented recently, and along the survey we provide introductory tutorial on many of the essential concepts and readings in erasure and Fountain codes. Packet erasure is a fundamental characteristic inherent in data storage and data transmission system. Traditionally replication/ retransmission based techniques had been employed to deal with packet erasures in such systems. While the Reed-Solomon (RS) erasure codes had been known for quite some time to improve system reliability and reduce data redundancy, the high decoding computation cost of RS codes has offset wider implementation of RS codes. However recent exponential growth in data traffic and demand for larger data storage capacity have simmered interest in erasure codes. Recent results have shown promising results to address the decoding computation complexity and redundancy tradeoff inherent in erasure codes.