Beyond routing via Network Coding: An overview of fundamental information-theoretic results

Abstract

Since the pioneering research work of Ahlswede et al. in 2000, Network Coding (NC) has rapidly emerged as a major research area in electrical engineering and computer science due to its wide applicability to communication through real networks. The many contributions available in the literature to date, ranging from pure theoretical studies on fundamental limits to practical experimentations in real-world environments, offer a clear evidence that the shift in paradigm envisaged by NC might revolutionize the way we manage, operate, and understand the organization of networks. NC allows intermediate nodes of communication networks to combine the information received from multiple links for subsequent transmissions, and offer a powerful and efficient generalization to network information delivery via routing, where network nodes simply store and forward data, and processing is only accomplished at the end nodes. In this paper, we have a twofold objective: i) first, we summarize fundamental information-theoretic results, which, since their publication, have been representing the foundation for all subsequent research in this field, and ii) then, we introduce and summarize the latest results related to the analysis, design, and optimization of the so-called network error correction coding problem, which is instrumental for the effective use of NC over lossy, e.g., wireless, networks.

Flexible Network Codes Design for Cooperative Diversity

“…We consider a very simple implementation in which the relays demodulate-network-code-and-forward (D-NC-F) each received symbol without checking whether the symbol is correct or wrong. The main aim of this assumption is to keep the complexity of the relays at a very low level (Koetter & Kschischang, 2008), and to understand the robustness, in terms of coding and diversity gain, of the error propagation problem (Di Renzo et al, 2010a), (Di Renzo et al, 2010b) on various network codes.…”

Network Code Design from Unequal Error Protection Coding: Channel-Aware Receiver Design and Diversity Analysis

“…NC offers the promise of improved performance over state-of-the-art routing, and, in particular, it finds successful application in multi-hop/cooperative wireless networks [2], [3], as it offers an efficient way for boosting the achievable throughput (see [4], [5], and references therein).…”

Security concerns and countermeasures in network coding based communication systems: A survey

“…Other relevant surveys on principal concepts of network coding theorem are [6,18], and the most recent [19]. Some tutorial on security attacks and threats in network coding based systems and summarizing the current mitigation techniques are [20][21][22][23][24][25].…”