Joint balanced source and network coding

We introduce a method that combines joint balanced source and network coding in optical packet-switched networks. It is an efficient way to combat packet loss that occurs due to contentions, to recover lost data due to link failures and to provide secure data transmission, i.e., secrecy. By using binary erasure codes and adding redundancy the destination is able to decode the source data when packet loss occurs. Coding at the intermediate node offers protection against single link failure. An eavesdropper cannot reconstruct the source data by eavesdropping a single link, since non-systematic coded packets are sent on disjoint paths.We also show that the proposed method has linear coding complexity, small header overhead and it does not require sending a feedback for each packet.