Survey of Applications of Network Coding in Wired and Wireless Networks

The authors review the basic works in the area of network coding and present a detailed survey of applications of network coding in network problems. It is shown that both in wired and wireless networks, multicast and broadcast protocols perform better with network coding. Even in unicast applications, network coding based protocols perform as well as the protocols without network coding. They also survey the applications of network coding in the domains of peer-to-peer networks, delay tolerant networks and wireless sensor networks. It is apparent from the results that innovative use of network coding can improve the performance of a variety of applications in these domains. Finally, they also suggest a number of interesting open problems in these domains where network coding can be used.