Abstract: Network coding is introduced in this paper, which is a new technique to improve the performance of multicast communication. The benefits of network coding for multicast communication mainly involve the following seven aspects: increasing the capacity; improving the traffic lode balancing; saving the bandwidth consumption; saving the energy consumption of wireless network nodes; decreasing the path delay of information propagation; enhancing the robustness of network connection and heightening the efficiency of error correction. And the most important problems of network coding are presented for future study.

Key words: multicast, network coding, max-flow, traffic load balancing

摘要： 介绍了用于改善组播通信性能的一种新方法，即网络编码；详细分析了网络编码对于组播通信的性能改善，包括提高组播网络的容量、改善网络链路的负载均衡、节省网络带宽资源消耗、节省无线网络节点的能量消耗、减小信息传播的路径时延、提高网络链接的鲁棒性和提高网络的纠错效率等；最后指出了关于网络编码的有待研究的重要问题。

关键词: 组播 网络编码 最大流 流量负载平衡