Abstract

We propose a distributed scheme for practical network coding that obviates the need for centralized knowledge of the graph topology, the encoding functions, and the decoding functions, and furthermore obviates the need for information to be communicated synchronously through the network. The result is a practical system for network coding that is robust to random packet loss and delay as well as robust to any changes in the network topology or capacity due to joins, leaves, node or link failures, congestion, and so on. We simulate such a practical network coding system using the network topologies of several commercial Internet Service Providers, and demonstrate that it can achieve close to the theoretically optimal performance.

Citations