Efficient mixed-generation concatenated network coding

Random network coding can be viewed as a single block code applied to all source packets. To manage the concomitant high coding complexity, source packets can be partitioned into generations; block coding is then performed on each set. To reach a better performance-complexity tradeoff, we propose a novel concatenated network code which mixes generations while retaining the desirable properties of generation-based coding. On erasure channels, the resulting probability of successfully decoding a generation can increase substantially; this holds for any erasure rate. We show how the codepsilas parameters can be tuned to extract best performance.