Efficiency of Secure Network Coding Schemes

Network coding is a promising approach for increasing performance of multicast data transmission and reducing energy costs. Of course, it is essential to consider security aspects to ensure a reliable data transmission. Particularly, pollution attacks may have serious impacts in network coding since a single attacker can jam large parts of the network. Therefore, various approaches have been introduced to secure network coding against this type of attack. However, introducing security increases costs. Even though there are some performance analysis of secure schemes, to our knowledge there are no details whether these schemes are worthwhile to replace routing under the facet of efficiency. Thus, we discuss in this paper parameters to assess the efficiency of secure network coding schemes. Using three network graphs, we evaluate parameters focusing on communication overhead for selected schemes. Our results show that there are still benefits in comparison to routing depending on the network topology.