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FREMONT, Calif., Jan. 18/Satnews Daily/ — Digital Fountain, a supplier of patented communications technology said on Monday Sirius Satellite Radio has signed a licensing agreement to use Meta-Content technology in upcoming products from Sirius. Over time, the companies said they expect that Digital Fountain technology to be incorporated into all Sirius Satellite radio receivers.
Sirius has licensed Digital Fountain's latest generation of technology known as Raptor. Digital Fountain claims Raptor is the most advanced Forward Error Correction (FEC) technology available today from any source.
"We evaluated a number of other alternatives and believe the efficiency and reliability of Digital Fountain Raptor best meets our needs," said Terry Smith, CTO of Sirius.
According to Digital Fountain, meta-content technology, including Raptor, is useful for data and file broadcasting applications because it allows for efficient data reception even when devices receive data at random and intermittent intervals, as is often the case with automotive receivers. For example, when using meta-content technology to receive a broadcast of a file, devices need only collect any set of packets approximately equal in length to the original data package to instantly and perfectly recreate the original data. Because there is no need to worry about which packets any particular receiver collects, the data is received quickly and reassembled accurately, even amidst intermittent reception schedules and frequent broadcast interruptions.
Raptor is a patented set of coding technologies created by Michael Luby and Amin Shokrollahi, two of Digital Fountain’s scientists.
The technology incorporates several unique properties that distinguish it from conventional FEC technologies. The company says Raptor codes are "rateless" meaning there is no limit on the amount of unique encoded data that can be generated. Second, the codes have the property that encoding and decoding calculation requirements are linear with respect to the size of the source data. This contrasts to conventional coding technologies where calculation requirements increase at an accelerating rate with larger size. Moreover, Raptor is extraordinarily efficient, allowing it to operate in software, even on low-power embedded processors.
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Sirius Satellite
Licenses Digital Fountain Meta-Content Technology