Robust network coding in the presence of untrusted nodes

  • Authors:

  • Da Wang;Danilo Silva;Frank R. Kschischang

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA and Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Universi ...;Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, State University of Carnpinas, ...;Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

While network coding can be an efficient means of information dissemination in networks, it is highly susceptible to "pollution attacks," as the injection of even a single erroneous packet has the potential to corrupt each and every packet received by a given destination. Even when suitable error-control coding is applied, an adversary can, in many interesting practical situations, overwhelm the error-correcting capability of the code. To limit the power of potential adversaries, a broadcast transformation is introduced, in which nodes are limited to just a single (broadcast) transmission per generation. Under this broadcast transformation, the multicast capacity of a network is changed (in general reduced) from the number of edge-disjoint paths between source and sink to the number of internally disjoint paths. Exploiting this fact, a family of networks is proposed whose capacity is largely unaffected by a broadcast transformation. This results in a significant achievable transmission rate for such networks, even in the presence of adversaries.