Network Coding as a Service

Abstract: Network Coding (NC) shows great potential in various communication scenarios through changing the packet forwarding principles of current networks. It can improve not only throughput, latency, reliability and security but also alleviates the need of coordination in many cases. However, it is still controversial due to widespread misunderstandings on how to exploit the advantages of it. The aim of the paper is to facilitate the usage of NC by $(i)$ explaining how it can improve the performance of the network (regardless the existence of any butterfly in the network), $(ii)$ showing how Software Defined Networking (SDN) can resolve the crucial problems of deployment and orchestration of NC elements, and $(iii)$ providing a prototype architecture with measurement results on the performance of our network coding capable software router implementation compared by fountain codes.