Protection against link errors and failures using network coding in overlay networks

We propose a network-coding based scheme to protect multiple bidirectional unicast connections against adversarial errors and failures in a network. The end nodes of the bidirectional connections are connected by a set of shared protection paths that provide the redundancy required for protection. Suppose that ne paths are corrupted by an omniscient, computationally unbounded adversary. Under our proposed protocol, the errors can be corrected at all the end nodes with 4n
e
protection paths. More generally, if there are n
e
adversarial errors and n
ƒ
failures, 4n
e
+ 2n
ƒ
protection paths are sufficient. The number of protection paths only depends on the number of errors and failures being protected against and is independent of the number of unicast connections.