Survey of network coding and its applications

Abstract

This survey summarizes the state-of-the-art research on network coding, mainly focusing on its applications to computer network-ing. Network coding generalizes traditional store-and-forward routing techniques by allowing intermediate nodes in networks to encode several received packets into a single coded packet before forwarding. Network coding was proposed in 2000, and since then, it has been studied exten-sively in the field of computer networking. In this survey, we first sum-marize linear network coding and provide a taxonomy of network coding research, i.e., the network coding design problem and network coding ap-plications. Moreover, the latter is subdivided into throughput/capacity en-hancement, robustness enhancement, network tomography, and security. We then discuss the fundamental characteristics of network coding and di-verse applications of network coding in details, following the above taxonomy. Copyright © 2011 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.