Coded based protection in mesh networks

Abstract

Since the Internet revolution of the 1990s; ever increasing levels of connectivity have been integrated into society. This has ushered in the era of globalization and a new plateau in prosperity. Credit for this accomplishment can be placed firmly on our communication networks. However, our incorporation of telecommunications into society has led to a dependency on it. Our escalating reliance on telecommunications has made society highly susceptible to fault occurrences. Consequently, the field of network survivability is required to maintain reliability in our telecommunications infrastructure. Mesh networks have been touted as the successor to the ring based networks of the past due to their efficiency and scalability. Unfortunately, mesh networks owing to their complexity have not been able to obtain restoration times comparable to its predecessor. This issue has led to a polarization of survivability schemes, where restoration time is pitted against redundancy requirements. In order to mitigate this problem; network coding based survivability algorithms are being proposed. Network coded based protection uses coding theory to linearly combine disjoint connections. This permits restoration times comparable to dedicated mesh schemes while having significantly less redundancy requirements. We propose three schemes of coded survivability known as Source Coded Protection, Multiple Source Coded Protection, and Network Coded Protection. From these three schemes, eight novel heuristic algorithms have been created.