Network Protection Codes Against Link Failures Using Network Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces network protection codes using network coding to safeguard against link failures without requiring additional paths, achieving high reliability with minimal capacity reduction.

Contribution

It proposes a novel network coding-based protection scheme that does not need extra links or resources, extending to multiple link failures and analyzing its implementation.

Findings

Protection codes are equivalent to erasure error-correcting codes.

Capacity reduction is asymptotically small in practical scenarios.

The scheme can be implemented at an overlay network layer.

Abstract

Protecting against link failures in communication networks is essential to increase robustness, accessibility, and reliability of data transmission. Recently, network coding has been proposed as a solution to provide agile and cost efficient network protection against link failures, which does not require data rerouting, or packet retransmission. To achieve this, separate paths have to be provisioned to carry encoded packets, hence requiring either the addition of extra links, or reserving some of the resources for this purpose. In this paper, we propose network protection codes against a single link failure using network coding, where a separate path using reserved links is not needed. In this case portions of the link capacities are used to carry the encoded packets. The scheme is extended to protect against multiple link failures and can be implemented at an overlay layer. Although this leads to reducing the network capacity, the network capacity reduction is asymptotically small in most cases of practical interest. We demonstrate that such network protection codes are equivalent to error correcting codes for erasure channels. Finally, we study the encoding and decoding operations of such codes over the binary field.