i-Code: A New Approach to Practical Network Coding for Content Distribution

Abstract

This paper studies the practicality of network coding to facilitate cooperative content distribution. Network coding is a new data transmission technique which allows any nodes in a network to encode and distribute data. It is a good solution offering reliability and efficiency in distributing content, but network coding has not been widely used because of its dubious performance gains and coding overhead in practice. With the implementation of network coding in a real-world application, this paper measures the performance and overhead of network coding for content distribution in practice. This study also provides a lightweight yet efficient encoding scheme which allows network coding to provide improved performance and robustness with negligible overhead.