Robust Network Coding in transport networks

After several years of ignorance in practice, Network Coding (NC) is gaining more and more attention in wireless networks. On the other hand, performing complex in-network operations requires extra hardware, which is still a real barrier of a widespread deployment of network coding in transport networks. However, recent technological trends, such as Network Function Virtualization, enable the deployment of network coding capable middleboxes at network nodes without complicated hardware-update, while Software-defined Networking (SDN) makes it possible to steer traffic to these middleboxes. Furthermore, a practical networking scenario was recently identified - namely the single link failure resilient case when user data can be split into two parts - for which simple coding operation at the edge nodes is sufficient to reach all benefits that network coding can provide. Built on these results, we demonstrate in the GÉANT OpenFlow Facility that network coding can be easily deployed in transport networks and brings real benefits for video streaming and distributed storage use cases.