Network Coding Implementation Details: A Guidance Document

Abstract

In recent years, network coding has become one of the most interesting fields and has attracted considerable attention from both industry and academia. The idea of network coding is based on the concept of allowing intermediate nodes to encode and combine incoming packets instead of only copy and forward them. This approach, by augmenting the multicast and broadcast efficiency of multi-hop wireless networks, increases the capacity of the network and improves its throughput and robustness. While a wide variety of papers described applications of network coding in different types of networks such as delay tolerant networks, peer to peer networks and wireless sensor networks, the detailed practical implementation of network coding has not been noted in most papers. Since applying network coding in real scenarios requires an acceptable understanding of mathematics and algebra, especially linear equations, reduced row echelon matrices, field and its operations, this paper provides a comprehensive guidance for the implementation of almost all required concepts in network coding. The paper explains the implementation details of network coding in real scenarios and describes the effect of the field size on network coding.