Improved compression of network coding vectors using erasure decoding and list decoding

TL;DR

This paper proposes novel packet formats for network coding that utilize erasure and list decoding, significantly reducing header overhead compared to traditional error decoding methods in multicast scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces new packet formats enabling erasure and list decoding, decreasing overhead in network coding multicast without compromising decoding performance.

Findings

Erasure decoding reduces header overhead in network coding.

List decoding offers further overhead reduction in certain scenarios.

Proposed schemes outperform previous error decoding approaches.

Abstract

Practical random network coding based schemes for multicast include a header in each packet that records the transformation between the sources and the terminal. The header introduces an overhead that can be significant in certain scenarios. In previous work, parity check matrices of error control codes along with error decoding were used to reduce this overhead. In this work we propose novel packet formats that allow us to use erasure decoding and list decoding. Both schemes have a smaller overhead compared to the error decoding based scheme, when the number of sources combined in a packet is not too small.