Area Constrained Space Information Flow

Abstract

Departing from Network Information Flow (NIF) that studies network coding in graphs, Space Information Flow (SIF) is a new research direction that studies network coding in geometric space, such as Euclidean space. This work focuses on the problem of Area Constrained Space Information Flow (ACSIF), which is a more practical branch of SIF that considers the constraint on the area where the candidate relay nodes should be placed. One of the key open problems in ACSIF is to design the algorithms that compute the min-cost in multicast networks. This work proposes the first heuristic algorithm based on Delaunay Triangulation (DT) and Linear Programming (LP) techniques that can build a min-cost multicast communication network for N (N ≥ 3) given terminal nodes in 2-D Euclidean space by taking into account the constrained area enclosed in circle with radius R around the terminal nodes. The proposed algorithm has a polynomial computational complexity and the simulation results show that it is effective.