  By extending the traditional store-and-forward mechanism, network coding has
the capability to improve a network's throughput, robustness, and security.
Given the fundamentally different packet processing required by this new
paradigm and the inflexibility of hardware, existing solutions are based on
software. As a result, they have limited performance and scalability, creating
a barrier to its wide-spread adoption. By leveraging the recent advances in
programmable networking hardware, in this paper we propose a random linear
network coding data plane written in P4, as a first step towards a
production-level platform. Our solution includes the ability to combine the
payload of multiple packets and of executing the required Galois field
operations, and shows promise to be practical even under the strict memory and
processing constraints of switching hardware.
