An achievable region for the double unicast problem based on a minimum cut analysis

Abstract: We consider the multiple unicast problem under network coding over directed acyclic networks when there are two source-terminal pairs, $s_1-t_1$ and $s_2-t_2$. Current characterizations of the multiple unicast capacity region in this setting have a large number of inequalities, which makes them hard to explicitly evaluate. In this work we consider a slightly different problem. We assume that we only know certain minimum cut values for the network, e.g., mincut$(S_i, T_j)$, where $S_i \subseteq {s_1, s_2}$ and $T_j \subseteq {t_1, t_2}$ for different subsets $S_i$ and $T_j$. Based on these values, we propose an achievable rate region for this problem based on linear codes. Towards this end, we begin by defining a base region where both sources are multicast to both the terminals. Following this we enlarge the region by appropriately encoding the information at the source nodes, such that terminal $t_i$ is only guaranteed to decode information from the intended source $s_i$, while decoding a linear function of the other source. The rate region takes different forms depending upon the relationship of the different cut values in the network.