Survey of Network Coding

Network coding,known as one of the most important breakthroughs on the theory of information processing and transmission,is based on the main idea that encoding and decoding operations are applied on the incoming messages of an intermediate node to produce coded outgoing ones before forwarding.Network coding has many advantages over conventional routing,such as providing higher network throughput,using bandwidth efficiently and balancing the traffic,etc.In this paper,we present the basic theory and main advantages and disadvantages of network coding,and then describe the key algorithms as well as giving a general review of some typical implementations of network coding in detail.In the end,the directions and future works are summarized.