Minimizing redundant paths for coding-based IP congestion control

Network coding brings a new solution for IP congestion control, since more than one buffered packets can be encoded together and removed as a coded packet. This may significantly decrease the packet loss during the congestion, but at the cost of building redundant paths. However, how to minimize the overhead of redundant paths turns out to be a NP-hard problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approximation algorithm called FlowGrouping, which transforms the redundant paths building problem into a limited clique partition problem by increasing edge weights, and can find a good approximate solution within O(n³) computation time.