Performance of network coding based multicast

In data networks, the selection of routes is an important issue. Regretably, little work about routing algorithms has been reported in the present literature on network coding. In the paper, detailed routing algorithms for network coding based multicast are proposed for low-rate multicast and for high-rate multicast. By using commonly used topology models of the Internet and ad hoc networks, topologies are generated. In these topologies multicast performance simulations for a network coding based routing algorithm, a shortest path distribution tree routing algorithm and a maximum-rate distribution tree routing algorithm are done respectively. Simulation results show that, for network coding based multicast, performance in terms of achievable throughput, resource consumption and load balancing has been improved to some extent over the other two routing algorithms.