CODED IP: On the Feasibility of IP-Layer Network Coding

Nowadays, the real practice of network coding in wireline networks is focused on the P2P overlay networks. Although it can help to utilize network resources more efficiently, P2P network coding does not exhibit benefits in terms of the maximum throughput. Our work aims to implement network coding at the IP layer, which is an idea not fundamentally new, but with little real practice because of the enormous difficulties involved. In this paper we propose CODED IP, a protocol framework that plugs network coding into the current IP stack. Experiments on a 22-node testbed show that CODED IP provides multicast traffic with not only a significantly higher throughput than overlay network coding and naive IP multicast, but also a more balanced load distribution as compared with overlay network coding.