Practical network coding

EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing, 2017

Future networks are expected to depart from traditional routing schemes in order to embrace network coding (NC)-based schemes. These have created a lot of interest both in academia and industry in recent years. Under the NC paradigm, symbols are transported through the network by combining several information streams originating from the same or different sources. This special issue contains thirteen papers, some dealing with design aspects of NC and related concepts (e.g., fountain codes) and some showcasing the application of NC to new services and technologies, such as data multi-view streaming of video or underwater sensor networks. One can find papers that show how NC turns data transmission more robust to packet losses, faster to decode, and more resilient to network changes, such as dynamic topologies and different user options, and how NC can improve the overall throughput. This issue also includes papers showing that NC principles can be used at different layers of the networks (including the physical layer) and how the same fundamental principles can lead to new distributed storage systems. Some of the papers in this issue have a theoretical nature, including code design, while others describe hardware testbeds and prototypes.

2008

Network coding promises to significantly impact the way communications networks are designed, operated, and understood. This book presents a unified and intuitive overview of the theory, applications, challenges, and future directions of this emerging field, and is a must-have resource for those working in wireline or wireless networking. • Uses an engineering approach - explains the ideas and practical techniques • Covers mathematical underpinnings, practical algorithms, code selection, security, and network management • Discusses key topics of inter-session (non-multicast) network coding, lossy networks, lossless networks, and subgraph-selection algorithms Starting with basic concepts, models, and theory, then covering a core subset of results with full proofs, Ho and Lun provide an authoritative introduction to network coding that supplies both the background to support research and the practical considerations for designing coded networks. This is an essential resource for gradu...

2007

Network coding is a new paradigm that is promising to change the way networking is done. In network coding intermediate nodes combine different packets to exploit more bandwidth and throughput. In addition, network coding reduces both delay and energy requirements.

2009

In this work, we study the computational perspective of network coding, focusing on two issues. First, we address the computational complexity of finding a network code for acyclic multicast networks. Second, we address the issue of reducing the amount of computation performed by network nodes. In particular, we consider the problem of finding a network code with the minimum possible number of encoding nodes, i.e., nodes that generate new packets by performing algebraic operations on packets received over incoming links.

In recent years, network coding has become one of the most interesting fields and has attracted considerable attention from both industry and academia. The idea of network coding is based on the concept of allowing intermediate nodes to encode and combine incoming packets instead of only copy and forward them. This approach, by augmenting the multicast and broadcast efficiency of multi-hop wireless networks, increases the capacity of the network and improves its throughput and robustness. While a wide variety of papers described applications of network coding in different types of networks such as delay tolerant networks, peer to peer networks and wireless sensor networks, the detailed practical implementation of network coding has not been noted in most papers. Since applying network coding in real scenarios requires an acceptable understanding of mathematics and algebra, especially linear equations, reduced row echelon matrices, field and its operations, this paper provides a comprehensive guidance for the implementation of almost all required concepts in network coding. The paper explains the implementation details of network coding in real scenarios and describes the effect of the field size on network coding.

Proceedings of the Second International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques, 2009

We present NECO, a high-performance simulation framework dedicated to the evaluation of network coding based protocols. Its main features include (1) definition of graphs representing the topology (which can be generated randomly or pre-defined by means of a standard representation), (2) modular specification of network coding protocols, (3) visualization of the network operation and (4) extraction of key statistics. The simulator is entirely written in Python and can be easily extended to account for extra functionalities.

Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international conference on Mobile computing and networking - MobiCom '07, 2007

Network coding is seen as a promising technique to improve network throughput. In this paper, we study two important problems in localized network coding in wireless networks, which only requires each node to know about and coordinate with one-hop neighbors. In particular, we first establish a condition that is both necessary and sufficient for useful coding to be possible. We show this condition is much weaker than expected, and hence allows a variety of coding schemes to suit different network conditions and application preferences. Based on the understanding we establish, we are able to design a robust coding technique called loop coding that can improve network throughput and TCP throughput simultaneously.

2006

In the multicast network coding problem, a source needs to deliver packets to a set of terminals over an underlying communication network . The nodes of the multicast network can be broadly categorized into two groups. The first group incudes encoding nodes, i.e., nodes that generate new packets by combining data received from two or more incoming links. The second group includes forwarding nodes that can only duplicate and forward the incoming packets. Encoding nodes are, in general, more expensive due to the need to equip them with encoding capabilities. In addition, encoding nodes incur delay and increase the overall complexity of the network. Accordingly, in this paper, we study the design of multicast coding networks with a limited number of encoding nodes. We prove that in a directed acyclic coding network, the number of encoding nodes required to achieve the capacity of the network is bounded by 3 2 . Namely, we present (efficiently constructible) network codes that achieve capacity in which the total number of encoding nodes is independent of the size of the network and is bounded by 3 2 . We show that the number of encoding nodes may depend both on and by presenting acyclic coding networks that require ( 2 ) encoding nodes. In the general case of coding networks with cycles, we show that the number of encoding nodes is limited by the size of the minimum feedback link set, i.e., the minimum number of links that must be removed from the network in order to eliminate cycles. We prove that the number of encoding nodes is bounded by (2 + 1) 3 2 , where is the minimum size of a feedback link set. Finally, we observe that determining or even crudely approximating the minimum number of required encoding nodes is an -hard problem.

2006

2013 IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), 2013

Network coding (NC) has attracted tremendous attention from the research community due to its potential to significantly improve networks' throughput, delay, and energy performance as well as a means to simplify protocol design and naturally providing security support. The possibilities in code design have produced a large influx of new ideas and approaches to harness the power of NC. But, which of these designs are truly successful in practice? and which designs will not live up to their promised theoretical gains due to real-world constraints? Without attempting a comprehensive view of all practical pitfalls, this paper seeks to identify key ingredients to a successful design, critical and common limitations to most intra-session NC systems as well as promising techniques and ideas to guide future models and research problems grounded on practical concerns.