A family of concatenated network codes for improved performance with generations

Random network coding can be viewed as a single block code applied to all source packets. To manage the concomitant high coding complexity, source packets can be partitioned into generations; block coding is then performed on each set. To reach a better performance-complexity tradeoff, we propose a novel concatenated network code which mixes generations while retaining the desirable properties of generation-based coding. Focusing on the code's erasure performance, we show that the probability of successfully decoding a generation on erasure channels can increase substantially for any erasure rate. Using both analysis (for small networks) and simulations (for larger networks), we show how the code's parameters can be tuned to extract best performance. As a result, the probability of failing to decode a generation is reduced by nearly one order of magnitude.