On efficient and reliable network coding in practical environment

Network coding can facilitate the communications from a sender to a set of receivers in a network by enlarging the multicast throughput. However, when applying network coding in practical network, problems such as link delay, delay jitter, and random link loss may seriously impair the network coding based multicast communications. In this paper, we carefully analyze the insufficiencies of the existing design for practical network coding in dealing with the above problems, and propose a series of approaches that may successfully solve those drawbacks. Our design involves an inter-node information exchange technique to reduce the waste of transmission resource, a new approach to deal with throughput lose caused by link delay, and a redundant information modulating technique to adapt the multicasting system to random changes of the max-flow in a network. Those mechanisms can make the network coding based multicasting system to become much more applicable and effective.