An efficient protection strategy using multiple network coding

Network coding has been recently proposed as a proactive network protection scheme. Its main objective is to improve the resilience of wired networks against link failures in a proactive manner, while simultaneously providing network resource savings (IP bandwidth, optical wavelengths) compared to traditional protection schemes. Warned by the potential network coding might bring as well as by the high chances this strategy might be widely deployed on failure-sensitive network scenarios, this paper is positioned with the aim of: i) exploring the advantages of network coding protection (NCP) versus the network resources used for protection; ii) comparing NCP with traditional protection schemes, such as shared path protection; iii) exploring the tradeoff between the protection cost and the level of resilience provided by a NCP scheme, and; iv) exploring the benefits of coding a coded traffic, in other words, introducing multiple coding for protection. Several protection schemes are evaluated in different incremental network topologies. The obtained results show that network coding with a M+N strategy can significantly reduce the amount of network resources used for protection.