Network Coding Techniques for Network Monitoring: a Brief Introduction

Monitoring and diagnosis of network conditions is a central problem in networking. As such, it has received a lot of attention in the Internet community in general and in the context of overlay networks in particular. Independently, recent advances in network coding have shown that it is possible to increase network capacity and better share the available resources by allowing intermediate nodes to perform processing operations, in addition to just forwarding packets. We here review use of network coding techniques in this context. As a specific application, we examine the well-known problem of network tomography, and in particular for inferring link loss rates from end-to-end measurements. Use of network coding can decrease the bandwidth used by probes, improve the accuracy of estimation, and decrease the complexity of selecting paths or trees to send probes