Network Coding Fundamentals

Introduction -- Network coding Fundamentals -- Harnessing Network Coding in Wireless Systems -- Network Coding for Content Distribution and Multimedia Streaming in Peer-to-Peer Networks -- Network Coding in the Real World -- Network Coding and User Cooperation for Streaming and Download Services in LTE Networks -- CONCERTO: Experiences with a Real-World MANET System Based on Network Coding -- Secure Network Coding: Bounds and Algorithms for Secret and Reliable Communications -- Network Coding and Data Compression -- Scaling Laws with Network Coding -- Network Coding in Disruption Tolerant Networks.

Network coding is an elegant and novel technique introduced at the turn of the millennium to improve network throughput and performance. It is expected to be a critical technology for networks of the future. This tutorial addresses the first most natural questions one would ask about this new technique: how network coding works and what are its benefits, how network codes are designed and how much it costs to deploy networks implementing such codes, and finally, whether there are methods to deal with cycles and delay that are present in all real networks. A companion issue deals primarily with applications of network coding.

This book is an evolution from my book A First Course in Information Theory published in 2002 when network coding was still at its infancy. The last few years have witnessed the rapid development of network coding into a research ?eld of its own in information science. With its root in infor- tion theory, network coding has not only brought about a paradigm shift in network communications at large, but also had signi?cant in?uence on such speci?c research ?elds as coding theory, networking, switching, wireless c- munications,distributeddatastorage,cryptography,andoptimizationtheory. While new applications of network coding keep emerging, the fundamental - sults that lay the foundation of the subject are more or less mature. One of the main goals of this book therefore is to present these results in a unifying and coherent manner. While the previous book focused only on information theory for discrete random variables, the current book contains two new chapters on information theory for continuous random variables, namely the chapter on di?erential entropy and the chapter on continuous-valued channels. With these topics included, the book becomes more comprehensive and is more suitable to be used as a textbook for a course in an electrical engineering department.

Network coding promises to significantly impact the way communications networks are designed, operated, and understood. The first book to present a unified and intuitive overview of the theory, applications, challenges, and future directions of this emerging field, this is a must-have resource for those working in wireline or wireless networking. *Uses an engineering approach - explains the ideas and practical techniques *Covers mathematical underpinnings, practical algorithms, code selection, security, and network management *Discusses key topics of inter-session (non-multicast) network coding, lossy networks, lossless networks, and subgraph-selection algorithms Starting with basic concepts, models, and theory, then covering a core subset of results with full proofs, Ho and Lun provide an authoritative introduction to network coding that supplies both the background to support research and the practical considerations for designing coded networks. This is an essential resource for graduate students and researchers in electronic and computer engineering and for practitioners in the communications industry.

Network Coding Applications looks at how ideas from network coding can have an impact on a number of new applications. It explains what network coding is, explores what its benefits are, and how much it costs to design and operate networks implementing network coding

Provides a tutorial on the basics of network coding theory. Divided into two parts, this book presents a unified framework for understanding the basic notions and fundamental results in network coding. It is aimed at students, researchers and practitioners working in networking research.

This book is an evolution from my book A First Course in Information Theory published in 2002 when network coding was still at its infancy. The last few years have witnessed the rapid development of network coding into a research ?eld of its own in information science. With its root in infor- tion theory, network coding has not only brought about a paradigm shift in network communications at large, but also had signi?cant in?uence on such speci?c research ?elds as coding theory, networking, switching, wireless c- munications,distributeddatastorage,cryptography,andoptimizationtheory. While new applications of network coding keep emerging, the fundamental - sults that lay the foundation of the subject are more or less mature. One of the main goals of this book therefore is to present these results in a unifying and coherent manner. While the previous book focused only on information theory for discrete random variables, the current book contains two new chapters on information theory for continuous random variables, namely the chapter on di?erential entropy and the chapter on continuous-valued channels. With these topics included, the book becomes more comprehensive and is more suitable to be used as a textbook for a course in an electrical engineering department.

The index coding problem provides a simple yet rich model for several important engineering tasks such as satellite communication, content broadcasting, distributed caching, device-to-device relaying, and interference management. This monograph provides a broad overview of this fascinating subject, focusing on the simplest form of multiple-unicast index coding. The main objective in studying the index coding problem are to characterize the capacity region for a general index coding instance in a computable expression and to develop the coding scheme that can achieve it. Despite their simplicity, these two closely related questions are extremely difficult and precise answers to them, after twenty years of vigorous investigation, are still in terra incognita. There are, nonetheless, many elegant results that shed light on the fundamental challenges in multiple-unicast network communication and expose intriguing interplay between coding theory, graph theory, and information theory. This monograph contains a concise survey of these results in a unified framework. It further discusses the relation to Network Coding and Distributed Storage. Fundamentals of Index Coding gives the reader a concise, yet comprehensive, overview of the work undertaken on this important topic; its relationship to adjacent areas and lays the groundwork for future research. It is a valuable starting point for all researchers and students in Information Theory.