Mobile Clouds: Exploiting Distributed Resources in Wireless, Mobile and Social Networks

5

Network Coding for Mobile Clouds

   

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

Eric Hoffer

This chapter introduces the main concept of network coding and underlines the importance of this disruptive key technology for mobile clouds. With reference to the previous chapters, the advantage of network coding is shown for efficient data dissemination in meshed networks, data storage and security. The aim of this chapter is to make the reader familiar with network coding concepts and principles without going through the details of the full theory behind it. This approach is enough to show the reader the excellent match between mobile clouds’ architecture and associated information flow on the one hand, and network coding efficiency across these distributed nodes on the other hand.

5.1 Introduction to Network Coding

We have emphasized the importance of network coding for mobile clouds in previous chapters and will rely on the capabilities of network coding in the following chapters as well. In this chapter, we formalize the basic concepts of network coding. We approach network coding in an intuitive manner, aiming at motivating users to understand its underlying principles and to learn how network coding can be applied to mobile clouds. Network coding can be used for many purposes such as security, file distribution and distributed storage, but this chapter focuses on the data throughput improvements and reduction in control information for the ...