On the solvability of 4s/3t sum-networks

Project Report Phase-1

By
Amit Kumar V. Jha
Roll No - 134102037
Supervisor - Dr. Brijesh Kumar Rai

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY GUWAHATI

Abstract
We consider directed acyclic networks where each terminal requires sum of all
the symbols generated by each source independently and one symbol at a time
from given field F. Such a class of networks has been termed as sum-networks in
the literature. A sum-network having m sources and n terminals has been termed
as ms / nt sum-network. A necessary and sufficient condition for a 3-sources
and 3-terminals also termed as 3s /3t sum-network to allow all the terminals to
recover the sum of source symbols over any field has already been given by Sagar
Shenvi and Bikash Kumar Dey[3]. It will be interesting to find a necessary and
sufficient condition for a sum-network with more number of sources and more
number of terminals. In this paper, we give a necessary and sufficient condition
for a 4s /3t sum-network.

Contents
1 Introduction

2 Terms and definitions

4 System modelling and Definitions

List of Figures

Introduction

In a network, mixing or coding of information at the intermediate nodes is referred

as a network coding. It has been shown by Ahlswede et al. [1] that network coding
has two main advantages over multi-cast or broadcast networks like saving in overall
bandwidth and increase in throughput when network coding is allowed. Network
coding can be implemented to fulfil requirement of all terminals or some set of terminals. The requirement may be any function of source symbols but we consider only
sum function in this paper because sum function is the simplest form and which
can be extended to reveal the intricacies of other functions. In [5], A. Ramamoorthy demonstrated that as long as there exist at most two sources and n terminals
or m sources and at most two terminals, it is possible to recover sum of all source
symbols over any F by all terminals if and only if all source-terminal pairs are connected. However, the source-terminal pair connectivity is proved to be insufficient
by B.K. Rai, B.K. Dey and A. Karandikar [4]. A necessary and sufficient condition
for a sum-network with exactly three sources and three terminals (also referred as
3s/3t sum network) is given by Sagar Shenvi and Bikash Kumar Dey[3] whereas, the
problem is still open for more general sum-networks with more number of sources
and terminals. In this paper, we give a necessary and sufficient condition for 4s/3t
sum-network.

Terms and definitions

In this section, we will present some well known terms and definitions which will
be used through out the work of this paper. We will also present some theorems and
lemmas form the previous papers which will be useful for our work.
Sum-Network: A network in which every terminal wants to recover sum of all
source symbols over a finite field F is called sum-network.
Connected: A network is said to be connected if and only if there exist at least one
path for every source-terminal pair.
Linear Network Coding: The network coding in which all nodes are allowed to perform only linear operations is called linear network coding. Otherwise, it is termed
as non linear network coding.
Fractional Network Code: A coding technique in which knumber of source symbols encoded in a block of length n such that k 6= n is called fractional network coding.
For k=n, the coding scheme is referred as vector network coding. In vector network
network coding, a block or vector of n source symbols is treated as a single symbol
at all nodes and edges and also receivers recover a vector of n symbols.
Code Rate: For a network having (k,n) fractional network code solution, it is possible to communicate k source symbols in n use of the network. For such a class of
network, code rate is defined as the ratio of k and n i.e k/n.
Coding Capacity: It is defined as the supremum of all achievable rates.
Solvable: A network is said to be solvable if and only if its coding capacity is at least
equal to 1.

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4

System modelling and Definitions

References
[1] R.Ahlswede,N.Cai,S.-Y.R.Li,andR.W.Yeung,Networkinformationflow,IEEE Trans.
Inf. Theory, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 12041216, 2000.
[2] S. Shenvi and B. K. Dey, On the solvability of 3-source 3-terminal sumnetworks,available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4137.
[3] A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Solvability of a3s/3tSum-network.
[4] B. K. Rai, B. K. Dey, and A. Karandikar, Some results on communicating the
sum of sources over a network, inProc. NetCod, 2009.
[5] A. Ramamoorthy, Communicating the sum of sources over a network, in Proc.
ISIT, (Toronto, Canada), pp. 16461650, 2008.
[6] B. K. Rai, B. K. Dey, and S. Shenvi, Some bounds on the capacity of communicating the sum of sources, inProc. ITW, 2010.
[7] R. Appuswamy, M. Franceschetti, N. Karamchandani, and K. Zeger, Network
coding for computing, in Proceedings of Annual Allerton Conference, (UIUC, IIlinois,
USA), 2008.