Raptor FEC codes

Raptor Forward Error Correction Technology

Rapator FEC technology is an intelligence property of Digital Fountain and adopted by several industry standards such as 3GPP, 3GPP2, DVB-H and Reliable Multicast Transport (RMT) working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

DF Raptor FEC is an erasure correction code, capable of correcting “missing” or “lost” data. By recovering lost data packets without requiring retransmission from the sender, a DF Raptor code efficiently and effectively provides reliability in data networks. And, like a water fountain producing an endless supply of water drops, any of which can be used to completely fill a glass, a DF Raptor code is a fountain code (a “digital fountain”) that can generate an unlimited number of encoded output symbols, any of which can be used to recover the original input symbols. DF Raptor FEC offers:

* The ability to generate a potentially limitless amount of encoded data from any original set of source data,thereby supporting extremes of low or high network loss as needed for a particular application.
* The ability to recover the original data from an amount of successfully received encoded data only slightly greater than the original source data, regardless of which specific encoded data has been received.
* Exceptionally fast encoding and decoding algorithms, making DF Raptor a highly scalable solution.

DF Raptor technology can be employed at the application or transport layer to provide reliability to data communications. Easily integrated into any application, DF Raptor FEC optimally protects streaming media or data distribution applications from the effects of packet loss, regardless of the source. DF Raptor is platform, source, and content agnostic. DF Raptor FEC technology guarantees error-free delivery in end-to-end communications over any data network, enhancing the quality of streaming content or accelerating the delivery of data. At the same time, DF Raptor FEC provides complete flexibility in balancing and optimizing a specific application’s requirements for bandwidth utilization, latency, and degree of packet loss protection. And because the algorithms employed by DF Raptor codes can be implemented as software on relatively low-power platforms, DF Raptor FEC enables a variety of new applications and services.