Maxflow-based Routing Algorithm for Network Coding Multicast
Wenqing Cheng · 2008
Network coding is an effective way to improve the performance of multicast communication. There are two steps that should be realized while using network coding in multicast network: one of finding proper transmission paths from source to multi-receivers and the other of determining the encoding scheme. For the latter problem, a variety of methods have been proposed. However, little research about the former has been done in the present work. In this paper, we propose a detailed maxflow-based routing algorithm to build proper transmission paths in multicast when using network coding. The algorithm, together with the existing encoding scheme, such as random network coding, can construct a practical multicast system. Simulations based on the algorithm show that, for network coding multicast, performance in terms of achievable throughput has been improved significantly in comparison with the traditional IP multicast.