Abstract
Luby Transform (LT) codes and Growth codes are fountains codes which receivemore attention recently in their rateless encoding characteristic. Once an enough amount of encoded symbols are correctly received, all information symbols could be recovered with high probability. Different from the characteristic of LT codes which promptly recover most information symbols in the latter receiving stages, Growth codes gradually recover them in every receiving stage. This is a desirable advantage of Growth codes for some internet applications such as picture showing. In this thesis, we consider applying Growth codes for multicast communication. In order to speed up the transmissions and therefore the reception and decoding processes, simple Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) algorithms using 1-bit acknowledgment, ACK at first arrival, ACK at last arrival and ACK at majority arrival are proposed for various purposes. Both independent and dependent erasure channels are considered. Compared to the original scheme without using ARQ, the simulation results show that the proposed schemes with the superiorities of effectively reducing the encoding overheads.