Link-Layer Encryption Effect on Achievable Capacity in Wireless
Network Coding Source: University of California In recent years,
network coding has been enthusiastically promoted for certain
wireless settings as a means of improving throughput and
achieving higher capacity. Naturally, such proposals focused on
communication issues, while paying less attention to security
implications. This paper considers the effect of Link-Layer
Encryption (LLE) on network coding in wireless networks. LLE is
a feature in current wireless networking standards (such as IEEE
802.11i) and its purpose is to mitigate traffic analysis attacks
that are possible even in the presence of end-to-end encryption.
The authors model single-source multicast using wireless network
coding and show that, unfortunately, LLE significantly decreases
the achievable capacity.