Abstract:
Traditionally, communication networks are composed of routing nodes, which relay and duplicate data. Work in recent years has shown that for the case of multicast, an improvement in both rate and code-construction complexity can be gained by replacing these routing nodes by linear coding nodes. These nodes transmit linear combinations of the inputs transmitted to them. In this work, we deal with bounds on the alphabet size of linear codes for multicast. We show both lower and upper bounds as a function of sink-set size and graph topology. We show that these bounds apply, as well, to a special case of multicast, static broadcast. We also show how node-memory addition can increase the effective alphabet-size available for coding.

Comment #1 to TR03-033 | 23rd June 2003 16:09

Comment Comment on: TR03-033

Abstract:
We have included a section on the number of nodes in which coding is required, as a function of the number of terminals and their rates.