Intermediate Performance Analysis of Growth Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytical framework for Growth codes, a subclass of Rateless codes, demonstrating their improved intermediate performance and applying this to error-resilient video transmission.

Contribution

It provides a generic asymptotic performance analysis for Growth codes using the Wormald method, applicable to non-precoded Rateless codes, and demonstrates their advantage in video transmission.

Findings

Growth codes show improved intermediate decoding probability.

The decoding probability model is validated through experiments.

Application to video transmission shows reduced distortion in intermediate loss regions.

Abstract

Growth codes are a subclass of Rateless codes that have found interesting applications in data dissemination problems. Compared to other Rateless and conventional channel codes, Growth codes show improved intermediate performance which is particularly useful in applications where performance increases with the number of decoded data units. In this paper, we provide a generic analytical framework for studying the asymptotic performance of Growth codes in different settings. Our analysis based on Wormald method applies to any class of Rateless codes that does not include a precoding step. We evaluate the decoding probability model for short codeblocks and validate our findings by experiments. We then exploit the decoding probability model in an illustrative application of Growth codes to error resilient video transmission. The video transmission problem is cast as a joint source and channel rate allocation problem that is shown to be convex with respect to the channel rate. This application permits to highlight the main advantage of Growth codes that is improved performance (hence distortion in video) in the intermediate loss region.