Abstract
Multicast transmission enables a sender to distribute data to multiple intended receivers simultaneously. However, the multicast transmission should be reliable in erasure channel. Forward Error Correction (FEC) enables the lost packets to be recovered from some extra redundant packets without any retransmission. In this paper, we propose a new FEC codes, called Polynomial Interpolation codes (PI codes), to provide reliable multicast data distribution. The PI codes which are inspired by secret sharing technology satisfy all requirements of FEC codes and more importantly, require less redundant transmission than other FEC codes. More specifically, a data consisting of k input symbols can be reconstructed from any κ of the sufficiently large number of output symbols encoded without overhead. The bit length of an output symbol may be equal to that of an input symbol without any description information. Besides that, our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of PI codes. © 2009 IEEE.