Network Coding and Subspace Designs

This book, written by experts from universities and major research laboratories, addresses the hot topic of network coding, a powerful scheme for information transmission in networks that yields near-optimal throughput. It introduces readers to this striking new approach to network coding, in which the network is not simply viewed as a mechanism for delivering packets, but rather an algebraic structure named the subspace, which these packets span. This leads to a new kind of coding theory, employing what are called subspace codes. The book presents selected, highly relevant advanced research output on: Subspace Codes and Rank Metric Codes; Finite Geometries and Subspace Designs; Application of Network Coding; Codes for Distributed Storage Systems. The outcomes reflect research conducted within the framework of the European COST Action IC1104: Random Network Coding and Designs over GF(q). Taken together, they offer communications engineers, R& D engineers, researchers and graduate students in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering a comprehensive reference guide to the construction of optimal network codes, as well as efficient encoding and decoding schemes for a given network code.