Towards the Limits of Network Performance Coding and Information Theoretic Approaches for Efficiency and Robustness

any features in modern networks have their roots in technologies developed for the Internet. The recent concept of network coding is an exception; and goes beyond traditional forwarding of immutable packets, viewing network operation instead as flows of information that can be operated on mathematically within the network. In particular, network nodes may perform mathematical operations across packets received on different incoming links so as to form new packets containing coded combinations of the original packets’ information, all of which will be subsequently decoded at other nodes in the network. Traditional store-and-forward operation, where network nodes simply route packets unchanged from incoming to outgoing links, is a special case of