Implementation Approach for Network Coding using External Devices in IP Multicast

Network coding is a novel technique to improve network throughput and performance by efficient encoding over the intermediate nodes in the network and works particularly well in multicasting. We expect that network coding will reduce the bandwidth utilization of IP broadcasting services that provide multichannel services and high quality videos using IP multicast. However, it is difficult to apply network coding to commercial networks because the routers actually used have no coding functions. In this paper, we propose a scheme that achieves network coding for IP multicast. It works by attaching external devices to routers instead of replacing them with network coding routers and can be applied to gigabit network by avoiding packet transmission excluding the target multicast.