Asynchronous Network Coded Multicast

The authors consider the problem of setting up a multicast connection of minimum cost using network coding. It is well known that this can be posed in the form of a convex program. The contribution is an asynchronous algorithm for solving the optimization problem, in analogy to the well-known distributed asynchronous Bellman-Ford algorithm for routing. Furthermore, this paper provides extensive simulation results showing fast convergence despite the lack of any central clock in the network and robustness with respect to link- or node failures.