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Network coding theory: An introduction

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Frontiers of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in China

Abstract

For a long time, store-and-forward had been the transport mode in network communications. In other words, information had been regarded as a commodity that only needs to be routed through the network, possibly with replication at the intermediate nodes. In the late 1990’s, a new concept called network coding fundamentally changed the way a network can be operated. Under the paradigm of network coding, information can be processed within the network for the purpose of transmission. It was demonstrated that compared with store-and-forward, the network throughput can generally be increased by employing network coding. Since then, network coding has made significant impact on different branches of information science. The impact of network coding has gone as far as mathematics, physics, and biology. This expository work aims to be an introduction to this fast-growing subject with a detailed discussion of the basic theoretical results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Network Coding and Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Raymond W. Yeung

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  1. Raymond W. Yeung
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Correspondence to Raymond W. Yeung.

Additional information

Raymond W. Yeung was born in Hong Kong on June 3, 1962. He received the B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1984, 1985, and 1988, respectively.

He was a Member of Technical Staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1988 to 1991. Since 1991, he has been with the Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he is now a chair professor. He is also a Changjiang Chair Professor at Xidian University (2009–2012) and an Advisory Professor at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications (2008–2011). He has held visiting positions at Cornell University, Nankai University, the University of Bielefeld, the University of Copenhagen, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Munich University of Technology. He was a Consultant in a project of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, for salvaging the malfunctioning Galileo Spacecraft and a Consultant for NEC, USA.

He is the author of the textbooks A First Course in Information Theory (Kluwer Academic/Plenum 2002) and its revision Information Theory and Network Coding (Springer 2008). His research interests include information theory and network coding.

Dr. Yeung was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1999 to 2001. He has served on the committees of a number of information theory symposiums and workshops. He was General Chair of the First and the Fourth Workshop on Network, Coding, and Applications (NetCod 2005 and 2008), a Technical Co-Chair for the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, and a Technical Co-Chair for the 2006 IEEE Information Theory Workshop. He currently serves as an Editor-at-Large of Communications in Information and Systems, an Editor of Foundation and Trends in Communications and Information Theory and of Foundation and Trends in Networking, and was an Associate Editor for Shannon Theory of this Transactions from 2003 to 2005. He was a recipient of the Croucher Foundation Senior Research Fellowship for 2000/2001, the Best Paper Award (Communication Theory) of the 2004 International Conference on Communications, Circuits and System (with C. K. Ngai), the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award (for his paper “Linear network coding” coauthored with S.-Y. R. Li and N. Cai), and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2007. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.

Since January 2010, Dr. Yeung has been serving as a Co-Director of the Institute of Network Coding at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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Yeung, R.W. Network coding theory: An introduction. Front. Electr. Electron. Eng. China 5, 363–390 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11460-010-0103-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11460-010-0103-1

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