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Multimedia (e.g., video) information exchange in VANET, if feasible, will help enhance vehicle navigation safety. We show that network coding allows very reliable and efficient data dissemination and thus is suitable for multimedia safety information dissemination. If the vehicle column has gaps, network coding jointly with "data muling" on vehicles in the opposite direction can deliver the multimedia files to disconnected components faster than other known schemes.

We consider the problem of establishing an efficient unicast connection over a wireless packet network. We show how network coding, combined with distributed flow optimization, gives a practicable approach that promises to significantly outperform the present approach of end-to-end or link-by-link retransmission combined with route optimization, where performance may be measured in terms of energy consumption, congestion, or any other cost that increases with the number of transmissions made by each node. We present a specific coding scheme and specific distributed flow optimization techniques that may be used to form the basis of a protocol

We present a capacity-achieving coding scheme for unicast or multicast over lossy packet networks. In the scheme, intermediate nodes perform additional coding yet do not decode nor even wait for a block of packets before sending out coded packets. Rather, whenever they have a transmission opportunity, they send out coded packets formed from random linear combinations of previously received packets. All coding and decoding operations have polynomial complexity. We show that the scheme is capacity-achieving as long as packets received on a link arrive according to a process that has an average rate. Thus, packet losses on a link may exhibit correlation in time or with losses on other links. In the special case of Poisson traffic with i.i.d. losses, we give error exponents that quantify the rate of decay of the probability of error with coding delay. Our analysis of the scheme shows that it is not only capacity-achieving, but that the propagation of packets carrying "innovative" information follows the propagation of jobs through a queueing network, and therefore fluid flow models yield good approximations. We consider networks with both lossy point-to-point and broadcast links, allowing us to model both wireline and wireless packet networks., 33 pages, 6 figures; revised appendix

The advent of network coding promises to change many aspects of networking. Network coding moves away from the classical approach of networking, which treats networks as akin to physical transportation systems. We overview some of the main features of network coding that are most relevant to wireless networks. In particular, we discuss the fact that random distributed network coding is asymptotically optimal for wireless networks with and without packet erasures. These results are extremely general and allow packet loss correlation, such as may occur in fading wireless channels. The coded network lends itself, for multicast connections, to a cost optimization which not only outperforms traditional routing tree-based approaches, but also lends itself to a distributed implementation and to a dynamic implementation when changing conditions, such as mobility, arise. We illustrate the performance of such optimization methods for energy efficiency in wireless networks and propose some new directions for research in the area.

We present decentralized algorithms that compute minimum-cost subgraphs for establishing multicast connections in networks that use coding. These algorithms, coupled with existing decentralized schemes for constructing network codes, constitute a fully decentralized approach for achieving minimum-cost multicast. Our approach is in sharp contrast to the prevailing approach based on approximation algorithms for the directed Steiner tree problem, which is suboptimal and generally assumes centralized computation with full network knowledge. We also give extensions beyond the basic problem of fixed-rate multicast in networks with directed point-to-point links, and consider the case of elastic rate demand as well as the problem of minimum-energy multicast in wireless networks.

In "On Coding for Reliable Communication over Packet Networks" (Lun, Medard, and Effros, Proc. 42nd Annu. Allerton Conf. Communication, Control, and Computing, 2004), a capacity-achieving coding scheme for unicast or multicast over lossy wireline or wireless packet networks is presented. We extend that paper's results in two ways: First, we extend the network model to allow packets received on a link to arrive according to any process with an average rate, as opposed to the assumption of Poisson traffic with i.i.d. losses that was previously made. Second, in the case of Poisson traffic with i.i.d. losses, we derive error exponents that quantify the rate at which the probability of error decays with coding delay., 5 pages; to appear in Proc. 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2005)

This paper shows that, for a particular class of channels that we believe applies to many physical problems of interest, the utility of feedback, insofar as channel capacity is concerned, is simply for allowing the transmitter to perform power control. This class of channels, which assumes noiseless feedback but allows for the feedback to be of arbitrary rate, includes channels that model slow, flat fading channels with variable input power. Thus our result gives some guidance on the design of effective transmission schemes for slow, flat fading channels with feedback.

We analyze the error probability of peaky signaling on bandlimited multipath fading channels, the signaling strategy that achieves the capacity of such channels in the limit of infinite bandwidth under an average power constraint. We first derive an upper bound for general fading, then specialize to the case of Rayleigh fading, where we obtain upper and lower bounds that are exponentially tight and, therefore, yield the reliability function. These bounds constitute a strong coding theorem for the channel, as they not only delimit the range of achievable rates, but also give us a relationship among the error probability, data rate, bandwidth, peakiness, and fading parameters, such as the coherence time. They can be used to compare peaky signaling systems to other large bandwidth systems over fading channels, such as ultra-wideband radio and wideband code-division multiple access. We find that the error probability decreases slowly with the bandwidth W; under Rayleigh fading, the error probability varies roughly as W/sup -/spl alpha//, where /spl alpha/>0. With parameters typical of indoor wireless situations, we study the behavior of the upper and lower bounds on the error probability and the reliability function numerically.

We present an upper bound on the probability of error of a signaling scheme that achieves the capacity of the multipath fading channel under an average power constraint in the limit of infinite bandwidth. The bound is derived under the assumption of Rayleigh block fading. We are therefore able to determine the performance of the scheme when a given finite bandwidth Is available. We evaluate the bound numerically for some reasonable parameters and study its interplay with other parameters of interest.

In this paper we examine possible ways that feedback can be used, in the context of systems with network coding capabilities. We illustrate, through a number of simple examples, that use of feedback can be employed for parameter adaptation to satisfy QoS requirements as well as for reliability purposes. We also argue that there are benefits in applying network coding to the feedback packets themselves, and finally, we examine the design of acknowledgment packets. These schemes operate at a network or application layer, and employ low complexity processing at intermediate nodes.

We consider the following packet coding scheme: The coding node has a fixed, finite memory in which it stores packets formed from an incoming packet stream, and it sends packets formed from random linear combinations of its memory contents. We analyze the scheme in two settings: as a self-contained component in a network providing reliability on a single link, and as a component employed at intermediate nodes in a block-coded end-to-end connection. We believe that the scheme is a good alternative to automatic repeat request when feedback is too slow, too unreliable, or too difficult to implement.

Background Understanding complex systems through decomposition into simple interacting components is a pervasive paradigm throughout modern science and engineering. For cellular metabolism, complexity can be reduced by decomposition into pathways with particular biochemical functions, and the concept of elementary flux modes provides a systematic way for organizing metabolic networks into such pathways. While decomposition using elementary flux modes has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding and manipulating cellular metabolism, its utility, however, is severely limited since the number of modes in a network increases exponentially with its size. Results Here, we present a new method for decomposition of metabolic flux distributions into elementary flux modes. Our method can easily operate on large, genome-scale networks since it does not require all relevant modes of the metabolic network to be generated. We illustrate the utility of our method for metabolic engineering of Escherichia coli and for understanding the survival of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) during infection. Conclusions Our method can achieve computational time improvements exceeding 2000-fold and requires only several seconds to generate elementary mode decompositions on genome-scale networks. These improvements arise from not having to generate all relevant elementary modes prior to initiating the decomposition. The decompositions from our method are useful for understanding complex flux distributions and debugging genome-scale models.