A large file sent over the Internet to many receivers splits into smaller packets. The packets may become corrupted or lost (erased) during transmission. Varying bandwidth may cause different receivers to receive these packets at different times. Large transmissions can be solved by the following three methods: (i) use acknowledgments for each received packet to signal which packets are to be retransmitted, as in TCP/IP, a very complex and inefficient process; (ii) use erasure correction codes in which redundancy is added by encoding a k-packet file as n packets (n > k), but not without issues when different receivers have unknown and varying loss rates; and (iii) produce an indefinitely long ...
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