Tunable Sparse Network Coding

A fundamental understanding of the relationship between delay performance and complexity in network coding is instrumental towards its application in practical systems. The main argument against delay-optimal random linear network coding (RLNC) is its decoding complexity, which is O(n) for n original packets. Fountain codes, such as LT and Raptor codes, reduce the decoding load on the receiver but at the cost of introducing additional, non-negligible delay. The source of this increased delay is the inherent sparsity of the code, which significantly reduces the impact of a new coded packet, i.e., the probability of a packet to be linearly independent from the knowledge at the receiver, as we approach the end of the transmission (when few degrees of freedom are missing). Thus, the additional overhead is mainly due to the transmission of the last data packets. Our key observation is that switching gears to denser codes as the transmission process progresses could considerably reduce the delay overhead while maintaining the complexity advantages of a sparse code. We propose tunable sparse network coding as a dynamic coding mechanism with a code structure with two regions: a sparse region, with various levels of sparsity, and a dense region, where packets are generated as per RLNC. We characterize the problem in multicast sessions on general networks and illustrate trade-offs in especial cases of interest. We also present a novel mechanism to perform efficient Gaussian elimination for sparse matrices that guarantees linear decoding complexity with high probability.