Some results on communicating the sum of sources over a network

Abstract

We consider the problem of communicating the sum of m sources to n terminals in a directed acyclic network. Recently, it was shown that for a network of unit capacity links with either m = 2 or n = 2, the sum of the sources can be communicated to the terminals using scalar/vector linear network coding if and only if every source-terminal pair is connected in the network. We show in this paper that for any finite set of primes, there exists a network where the sum of the sources can be communicated to the terminals only over finite fields of characteristic belonging to that set. As a corollary, this gives networks where the sum can not be communicated over any finite field using vector linear network coding even though every source is connected to every terminal.