Network coding is a new research area that may have interesting applications in practical networking systems. With network coding, intermediate nodes may send out packets that are linear combinations of previously received information. There are two main benefits of this approach: potential throughput improvements and a high degree of robustness. Robustness translates into loss resilience and facilitates the design of simple distributed algorithms that perform well, even if decisions are based only on partial information. Here we explain what network coding does and how it does it. We also discuss the implications of theoretical results on network coding for realistic settings and show how network coding can be used in practice.
In particular, we show that Network Coding is practical in a P2P setting since it incurs little overhead, both in terms of CPU processing and I/O activity, and it results in smooth, fast downloads, and efficient server utilization. We also study the importance of topology construction algorithms in real scenarios and study the effect of peers behind NATs and firewalls, showing that the system is surprisingly robust to large number of unreachable peers. Finally, we present performance results related to verifying network encoded blocks on-the-fly using special security primitives called Secure-Random-Checksums.
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