A practical network coding and routing scheme based on maximum flow combination

Network coding is a novel field of information theory and coding theory. It is a breakthrough over the traditional store-and-forward routing methods by allowing coding of two or more packets together. From an information flow aspect, multiple flows could be overlapped in a routing scheme. Hence, the theoretical upper bound of multicast capacity could be achieved by network coding. In this project, a complete routing and coding scheme is constructed to realize the maximum multicast transportation task. In order to implement the scheme, the paths of multiple max-flows are determined Edges are divided into overlapped and normal type based on the merged max-flows. The transmitting data is represented using packets in a specific format. Multicast, forward and coding operations are defined to transmit data at the nodes. The nodes are classified according to the type of operations. A dynamic coding and routing algorithm is proposed to route packets gradually from source node to destinations in topological sorting order by the three operations on the path of merged max-flows. We show that the use of simple xor operations can satisfy most of network topologies. The running time of the algorithm presented here is less than one second for most of the benchmark and random data sets.