On achieving maximum secure throughput using network coding against wiretap attack

In recent years network coding has attracted significant attention in telecommunication. The benefits of network coding to a communication network include the increased throughput as well as secure data transmission. The purpose of this work is to design secure linear network coding against wiretap attack. The problem is to maximize the transmission data rate of multiple unicast streams between a pair of source and destination nodes, under the condition of satisfying the weakly secure requirements. Different from most existing research on network coding that designs the network coding scheme based on a given network topology, we will consider the integrated network topology design and network coding design. Such an integrated approach has not been reported by other researchers. In this paper, we formally introduce the problem, prove the problem is computational intractable, and then develop efficient heuristic algorithms. We first try to find the transmission topology that is suitable for network coding. Based on the topology, we design linear network coding scheme that is weakly secure. We conduct simulations to show that the proposed algorithms can achieve good performance. © 2010 IEEE.