Low complexity opportunistic decoder for network coding

In this paper, we propose a novel opportunistic decoding scheme for network coding decoder which significantly reduces the decoder complexity and increases the throughput. Network coding was proposed to improve the network throughput and reliability, especially for multicast transmissions. Although network coding increases the network performance, the complexity of the network coding decoder algorithm is still high, especially for higher dimensional finite fields or larger network codes. Different software and hardware approaches were proposed to accelerate the decoding algorithm, but the decoder remains to be the bottleneck for high speed data transmission. We propose a novel decoding scheme which exploits the structure of the network coding matrix to reduce the network decoder complexity and improve throughput. We also implemented the proposed scheme on Virtex 7 FPGA and compared our implementation to the widely used Gaussian elimination.