A General Co/Decoder of Network Coding in HDL

This paper presents a practical and general coder and decoder of network coding (NC) with HDL (Hardware Description Language) logic for wire-speed nodes in multisource multicast networks. The NC coders apply random linear network coding (RLNC) and the decoders recover the original packets by Cramer's rule. All these mathematical operations are carried out in the Galois Field (256). The structures and algorithms of NC coder and decoder were designed in detail and implemented in HDL with NetFPGA boards provided by Stanford University. Comparing with traditional stored-and-forward mechanism, network emulations showed that networks with wire-speed NC coder and decoder nodes could achieve the capacity bound of max-flow min-cut theorem in case of bottlenecks, and the end-to-end delay was guaranteed on a small constant.