This project studies the emerging field of network coding in several new directions. Network coding offers the promise of improved performance over conventional network routing techniques, by allowing network nodes to mathematically combine information prior to retransmission. Over the next decade, it has the potential to become a pervasive technology that could radically change the way information is communicated. In particular, network coding principles can significantly impact the next-generation wireless, ad hoc, and sensor networks, in terms of both energy efficiency and throughput.
While most of the existing network coding theory assumes error-free links, in practice these links are usually noisy. In fact, error-correction coding for such noisy links is sub-optimal when it is separated from network coding --- to maximize the throughput of a network, channel and network coding must be combined. Thus, one of the main research topics studied in this project is joint network and channel coding. The project focuses on the following subtopics: (i) Reverse concatenation of network and channel coders (ii) Joint network/channel coding at the node level (ii) Global network/channel coding at the network level The second main research topic is broadcast-mode network coding. This concerns applications in ad hoc wireless networks. Subtopics include: (i) Linear network coding (ii) Network capacity (iii) Iterative design of broadcast-mode network codes.
