Encoding of Network Protection Codes Against Link and Node Failures Over Finite Fields

Link and node failures are common two fundamental problems that affect operational networks. Hence, protection of communication networks is essential to increase their reliability, performance, and operations. Much research work has been done to protect against link and node failures, and to provide reliable solutions based on pre-defined provision or dynamic restoration of the domain. In this paper we develop network protection strategies against multiple link failures using network coding and joint capacities. In these strategies, the source nodes apply network coding for their transmitted data to provide backup copies for recovery at the receivers’ nodes. Such techniques can be applied to optical, IP, and mesh networks. The encoding operations of protection codes are defined over finite fields. Furthermore, the normalized capacity of the communication network is given by (n − t)/n in case of t link failures. In addition, a bound on the minimum required field size is derived.