Optimization based rate control for multicast with network coding: A multipath formulation

Network coding offers new capabilities for efficient information multicasting in communication networks. In this paper, we study rate control for multicast with network coding. We propose a path-based multicasting scheme, where each source has multiple paths to each receiver in the multicast group. One advantage of this approach over a tree-based approach is that it is easier to find a minimum cost set of paths as compared to trees. We present three end-to-end rate control algorithms which operate over the set of paths supplied by the network layer. With random network coding, all algorithms can be implemented in a distributed manner. Our algorithms can also be generalized to solve other optimization problems with non-strictly concave objection function.