Optimal routing and bandwidth provisioning for survivable IPTV multicasting using network coding

Network coding has been proven with the capability to improve the network bandwidth efficiency for multicast communications. Streaming based IPTV services provided by network operators match the paradigm of using network coding. However, the major research works in the literature focus on the selection of network codes under given routing paths. Few research work jointly considers routing and network coding together to obtain survivable multicast routing and minimum bandwidth provision. In this paper, we investigate this new research topic and propose mathematical models that can be used to obtain an optimal routing for survivable multicast communications against any single link/node failure. To clarify the gain from applying network coding, we also made performance comparisons between the network-coding-based protection schemes and those without using network coding. We observe that the network coding scheme holds the best performance for all cases we had simulated. The trade-offs between the network protection schemes with and without using network coding are also identified in this paper.