Abstract
Several applications benefited from multicast data distribution because a sender can concurrently transmit data to multiple receivers using fewer bandwidth. However, reliability is an important issue in multicast because retransmission is not very efficient in multicast. In recent years, Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes are proposed to facilitate reliable multicast data distribution and are applied to several applications. FEC provides a more efficient way of reliable multicast data distribution because of no retransmission. In this paper, we propose a new FEC codes (F-CR codes), which are extended from Chinese Remainder codes, require smaller transmission redundancy than conventional FEC codes and support two variants for transmission and computation efficiency. In particular, the r-decomposition variant allows the sender to decompose an output symbols encoded into r smaller subsymbols. This decomposable property which is firstly proposed in this paper is especially suitable for link unstable networks or link heterogeneity networks like wireless sensor networks. The analysis and experiments also demonstrate the feasibility of F-CR codes. © 2009 IEEE.