Performance Evaluation of New Multicast Architecture with Network Coding

In order to enhance multicast communication, it is important to investigate effects of network coding which can be a typical application of active network. In this paper, we study the feasibility of network coding based multicast architecture from performance aspect. We first show that the network coding based multicast has not only high transmission capacity with the max-flow, which is an original purpose of network coding, but also a load balancing effect which mitigates concentration of traffic load in a network. Then, with a computer simulation, we evaluate network coding based multicast in terms of both of the max-flow and load balancing. Keywords— Multicast, Network Coding, Network Information Theory, Max-flow.