Multipath routing based on a network coding protocol suit

New emerging technologies and applications are overtaking the performance that the legacy Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol architecture1 can provide despite improvements having achieved in newly-proposed transport layer protocols2,3. By utilizing links of a network as many as possible to transmit data packets, network coding holds promise of multipath routing for the future Internet protocol networks, which is different from existing routing protocols where packets are delivered along the shortest path to the destination4,5. However, its practical implementation encounters two primary challenges: forming a directed acyclic graph (similar to the shortest path first tree in existing routing protocols) between the source and destination, and distributing an appropriate encoding matrix to each node of the graph. Here we show an integrated depth-first and breadth-first search algorithm that builds a multipath routing table for each node, thereby constructing a directed acyclic graph. We also find that, based on this search algorithm, it is easy to develop a complete network coding protocol suite. Moreover, an integration with the intermediate system-to-intermediate system within a test bed environment revealed significant performance improvements. This result marks the advent of an alternative and new, endogenous security, well compatible general routing solution for the future networks.