An information theoretic view of network management

—We present an information-theoretic framework for network management for recovery from nonergodic link failures. Building on recent work in the field of network coding, we describe the input–output relations of network nodes in terms of network codes. This very general concept of network behavior as a code provides a way to quantify essential management information as that needed to switch among different codes (behaviors) for different failure scenarios. We compare two types of recovery schemes, receiver-based and network-wide, and consider two formulations for quantifying network management. The first is a centralized formulation where network behavior is described by an overall code determining the behavior of every node, and the management requirement is taken as the logarithm of the number of such codes that the network may switch among. For this formulation, we give bounds, many of which are tight, on management requirements for various network connection problems in terms...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Tracey Ho, Muriel Médard, Ralf Koetter
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2003, Management Requirement, Network Behavior, Network Management