Design and experimental demonstration of network coding in all-optical multicast networks

The network coding paradigm enables better resource utilization and improves throughput in communication networks, thus, employing network coding in all-optical multicast networks will facilitate the future development of effective optical networks. However, some properties of optical networks, such as limited buffering and weak logic operation capabilities, restrict the application of network coding in optical multicast networks. So in this paper, several problems of adapting network coding to all-optical multicast networks are addressed: (1) Put forward a novel strategy to distribute encoding vectors in all-optical networks, and, (2) design a framework of Encoding Node Model to support the special scheme of encoding vectors assignment in practical networks. Moreover, the experimental demonstration indicates that it is feasible and efficient to employing network coding in optical-layer multicast traffic.