A Distributed Framework for Network Coding Based on a Novel State Space Approach

In this paper we present a new framework, for solving a network coding problem, based on control theory. In particular, we show that the proposed framework allows to solve a network coding problem in a distributed and deterministic manner for both cyclic and acyclic graphs when multiple sources and sinks are considered. As the main result we prove that, under proper topological conditions, given a network composed by n nodes, using the proposed approach, a node is able to obtain the messages of all the others nodes without any routing information by exchanging 2 n + 1 messages with its neighbors.