An Efficient Error-Detection and Error-Correction (EDEC) Scheme for Network Coding

Network coding is being viewed to have the potential for significant throughput improvement in network environment. However, these expected benefits are very fragile to malicious attacks, including message block content corruption and node compromise attacks. To solve these problems, both pollution detection and pollution correction based schemes have been proposed. These schemes are only effective in some limited scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new scheme that combines the benefits of the existing error-detection and error-correction (EDEC) schemes. The proposed scheme is similar in structure to the existing error-control based schemes. However, by appropriately modifying the rate of the underlying error-control scheme, we can improve the network throughput and robustness significantly. Our scheme can detect the malicious attacks by computing whether the syndromes are all zeros. By collecting all the non-zero syndromes, the malicious attacks within the error-decoding capacity of the underlying linear network coding can be removed and the original message can be recovered. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed EDEC scheme can improve the overall network performance dramatically with only a very moderate increase of the computational overhead.