Distributed topology design for network coding deployed networks

Minhae Kwon, Hyunggon Park

Abstract: Highlights • We formulate the problem of network topology design as a network formation game, which leads to a distributed strategy for topology formation. • We analytically show that network coding decomposes the network formation game into link formation games, leading to an algorithm with significantly low complexity. • We design a utility function for the network formation game such that nodes can explicitly consider the tradeoff between the distance reduction and the cost associated with making links. • We quantitatively evaluate the proposed solution and show that the proposed solution eventually leads to increased network throughput and a reduced number of unnecessary redundant links between nodes. Abstract In this paper, we propose a solution to the distributed topology formation problem for large-scale sensor networks with multi-source multicast flows. The proposed solution is based on game-theoretic approaches in conjunction with network coding. The proposed algorithm requires significantly low computational complexity, while it is known as NP-hard to find an optimal topology for network coding deployed multi-source multicast flows. In particular, we formulate the problem of distributed network topology formation as a network formation game by considering the nodes in the network as players that can take actions for making outgoing links. The proposed solution decomposes the original game that consists of multiple players and multicast flows into independent link formation games played by only two players with a unicast flow. We also show that the proposed algorithm is guaranteed to determine at least one stable topology. Our simulation results confirm that the computational complexity of the proposed solution is low enough for practical deployment in large-scale networks.