IJSC&N Special Issue “network coding applications in satellite networks”: Guest editorial message

摘要

In contrast to conventional point-to-point transmission, where only data sources can send encoded packets, network coding allows intermediate nodes in a network to (re-)encode packets before sending them instead of adopting a simple store-and-forward routing approach. It has been shown that network coding can provide many advantages in correcting random packet erasures and in improving the performance of reliable multicast schemes. The advantages are significant in error-prone scenarios like those with mobile users. The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) has approved the Network Coding Research Group (NWCRG), considering important aspects concerning the adoption of network coding, such as architectural issues, end-to-end versus hop-by-hop network coding, inter-flow network coding (at OSI layer 3 or layer 2) versus intra-flow, application-layer network coding, security issues and robustness to attacks, packet formats, and proactive protection with network coding versus reactive mechanisms based on classical ARQ schemes.