Fountain Codes are a new class of codes designed for transmission of data on erasure channels with unknown erasure probabilities. Raptor codes form a sub-class of Fountain Codes. They allow for linear time encoding and decoding algorithms. Particulary designed codes from this class approach the capacity of an unknown erasure channel arbitrarily closely.
On the theoretical side, I will discuss properties and applications of these codes as erasure and error-correcting codes, and introduce their relationship to threshold phenomena in random graphs. On the practical side, I will introduce some applications of these codes.