  The rateless and information additive properties of fountain codes make them
attractive for use in broadcast/multicast applications, especially in radio
environments where channel characteristics vary with time and bandwidth is
expensive. Conventional schemes using a combination of ARQ (Automatic Repeat
reQuest) and FEC (Forward Error Correction) suffer from serious drawbacks such
as feedback implosion at the transmitter, the need to know the channel
characteristics apriori so that the FEC scheme is designed to be effective and
the fact that a reverse channel is needed to request retransmissions if the FEC
fails. This paper considers the assessment of fountain codes over radio
channels. The performance of fountain codes, in terms of the associated
overheads, over radio channels of the type experienced in GPRS (General Packet
Radio Service) is presented. The work is then extended to assessing the
performance of Fountain codes in combination with the GPRS channel coding
schemes in a radio environment.
