Linear network coding provides a new communication diagram to significantly increase the network capacity by allowing the relay nodes to encode the incoming messages. However, this communication diagram is fragile to communication errors and node compromising attacks. How to combat errors while maintaining the network efficiency is a challenging research problem. In this paper, we characterize a linear network coding through a series of cascaded linear error-control codes. This representation enables us to determine the independent source of errors in the cascaded network level. It could lead to a successful decoding of the original message and locating of the malicious network nodes. We provide comprehensive theoretical analysis on network coding in both unicast and multicast scenarios. Our research provides a new approach to understand network coding schemes and also a novel methodology to develop network coding schemes that can combat node compromising attacks and locate the malicious nodes.
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