Processing along the way: forwarding vs. coding
Daniela Tuninetti, Christina Fragouli · Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) · 2004
We consider a source that transmits to a receiver by routing the information packets over a communication network and examine rate benefits that finite complex-ity processing at the intermediate nodes may offer. We show that the processing capabilities of the interme-diate nodes affect not only the end-to-end achievable rate, but also the optimal routing strategy. For ex-ample, there exist network configurations where the maximal throughput is achieved only by coding across independent information streams. 1.