Survey of Network Coding and Its Applications

This survey summarizes the state-of-the-art research on network coding, mainly focusing on its applications to computer networking. Network coding generalizes traditional store-and-forward routing techniques by allowing intermediate nodes in networks to encode several received packets into a single coded packet before forwarding. Network coding was proposed in 2000, and since then, it has been studied extensively in the field of computer networking. In this survey, we first summarize linear network coding and provide a taxonomy of network coding research, i.e., the network coding design problem and network coding applications. Moreover, the latter is subdivided into throughput/capacity enhancement, robustness enhancement, network tomography, and security. We then discuss the fundamental characteristics of network coding and diverse applications of network coding in details, following the above taxonomy. key words: network coding, design problem, throughput/capacity enhancement, robustness enhancement, network tomography, security