Routing Algorithm for Network Coding Based Multicast

Network coding (NC) is one of the most important breakthroughs on the theory of information transmission and processing. Network coding can improve the performance of multicast by performing encoding operations at intermediate nodes. There are two steps should be realized while using network coding in multicast communication: one is finding proper transmission paths from source to multi-receivers and the other is determining the coding scheme. For the latter problem, a variety of methods have been proposed. However, little research about the former has been done in the present work. In this paper, we present a detailed routing algorithm for network coding based multicast. Simulations based on this algorithm show that, for network coding based multicast, performance in terms of achievable throughput and bandwidth consumption has been improved to some extend over the traditional IP multicast.