Construction of Codes for Network Coding

Based on ideas of K\"otter and Kschischang we use constant dimension subspaces as codewords in a network. We show a connection to the theory of q-analogues of a combinatorial designs, which has been studied in Braun, Kerber and Laue as a purely combinatorial object. For the construction of network codes we successfully modified methods (construction with prescribed automorphisms) originally developed for the q-analogues of a combinatorial designs. We then give a special case of that method which allows the construction of network codes with a very large ambient space and we also show how to decode such codes with a very small number of operations

A Note on the Injection Distance

Koetter and Kschischang showed in [R. Koetter and F.R. Kschischang, "Coding for Errors and Erasures in Random Network Coding," IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, {54(8), 2008] that the network coding counterpart of Gabidulin codes performs asymptotically optimal with respect to the subspace distance. Recently, Silva and Kschischang introduced in [D. Silva and F.R. Kschischang, "On Metrics for Error Correction in Network Coding," To appear in IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, ArXiv: 0805.3824v4[cs.IT], 2009] the injection distance to give a detailed picture of what happens in noncoherent network coding. We show that the above codes are also asymptotically optimal with respect to this distance