Joint routing and random network coding for multi-session networks

A joint routing and random network coding approach is introduced for the multi-session networks. With the proposed approach, part of the information is transmitted using routing, to reduce the inter-session interference, and the rest of the information is randomly combined at the intermediate nodes with proper precoding at the source nodes. The path used for routing and the corresponding routing rate can be determined using simple Fourier-Motzkin eliminations. It can be proved that proposed scheme achieves higher rate region compared with either pure routing or random network coding.