Abstract: Problems on link failure recoveries in multicast networks are considered. From the idea of erasure codes, a way to construct a reliable multicast system based on network coding is presented. When limited link failures have occurred in the network, we can have a recover-based solution for all recoverable failures with a static network code, and do not need to change the coding of interior nodes. Based on the information flow decomposition, a way to construct the network codes in a smaller field is proposed. In this way, we can provide nearly instantaneous self-healing multicast communication networks to enhance the robustness of the multicast connections, and achieve a higher rate of multicasting with less required network capacity.

Key words: link failure, network recovery, erasure code, network coding