Protection Against Link Errors and Failures Using Network Coding
Shizheng Li, Aditya Ramamoorthy · IEEE Transactions on Communications · 2010
We propose a network-coding based scheme to protect multiple bidirectional unicast connections against adversarial errors and failures in a network. The network consists of a set of bidirectional primary path connections that carry the uncoded traffic. The end nodes of the bidirectional connections are connected by a set of shared protection paths that provide the redundancy required for protection. Such protection strategies are employed in the domain of optical networks for recovery from failures. In this work we consider the problem of simultaneous protection against adversarial errors and failures. Suppose that nepaths are corrupted by the omniscient adversary. Under our proposed protocol, the errors can be corrected at all the end nodes with 4neprotection paths. More generally, if there are neadversarial errors and nffailures, 4ne+ 2nfprotection paths are sufficient. The number of protection paths only depends on the number of errors and failures being protected against and is independent of the number of unicast connections.