Recursive and Non-Recursive Network Coding: Performance and Complexity

While network coding promises to increase throughput, network nodes incur increased complexity as they are relied on to perform packet mixing. Previous works have proposed to manage network-level complexity by reducing the number of network coding transport nodes. Here, we study the tradeoff between transport-node complexity and achievable throughput rates. We compare two encoding schemes: recursive and non-recursive. We show that due to the peculiarities of network coding, non-recursive coding achieves considerably higher rates, for comparable computational and storage requirements. We also show that by replacing multiplication with shifting, complexity is further reduced, with negligible impact on performance.