Network Coding Protocols for Peer-to-Peer Networks
João Barros, Rui Prior, DCC-FCUP

In today's networks information is dealt with in a very similar way to any typical commodity: text, audio or video sources are encoded into bits, segmented into packets and transmitted from node to node until their destination. But information does not behave like a typical commodity, in fact it allows us to mix information bits from different flows into multiple packets using basic coding operations and then to recover the sent data at the destination using standard decoding algorithms.

This dissertation aims at exploiting the rich body of network coding theory towards developing highly efficient and robust protocols for content distribution in
peer-to-peer networks.

The expected outcomes of this research are thus

(a) a in-depth understanding of the applicability of network coding to
distributed storage and dissemination,
(b) a set of protocols that can be readily used for this task,
(c) extensive performance evaluation both in terms of simulation and real-life prototypes.