On the Capacity Bounds of Undirected Networks

"Eligible for the student paper award." In this work we improve on the bounds presented in Z. Li and B. Li (2004) for network coding gain in the undirected case. A tightened bound for the undirected multicast problem with three terminals is derived. An interesting result shows that with fractional routing, routing throughput can achieve at least 75 % of the coding throughput. A tighter bound for the general multicast problem with any number of terminals shows that coding gain is strictly less than 2. Our derived bound depends on the number of terminals in the multicast network and approaches 2 for arbitrarily large number of terminals.