The proliferation of applications that must reliably distribute 
  bulk data to a large number of autonomous clients motivates
  the design of new multicast and broadcast protocols. 
We describe an ideal, fully scalable protocol for these applications 
  that we call a digital fountain.
A digital fountain allows any number of heterogeneous 
  clients to acquire bulk data with optimal efficiency 
  at times of their choosing. 
Moreover, no feedback channels are needed to ensure 
  reliable delivery, even in the face of high loss rates. <P>

We develop a protocol that closely approximates a digital fountain 
  using a new class of erasure codes that for large block sizes
  are orders of magnitude faster than standard erasure codes.
We provide performance measurements that demonstrate the feasibility
  of our approach and discuss the design, implementation and 
  performance of an experimental system. <P>

To appear in SIGCOMM 98. <P>