  In Information-Centric Networking (ICN), consumers send interest packets to
the network and receive data packets as a response to their request without
taking care of the producers, which have provided the content, contrary to
conventional IP networks. ICN supports the use of multiple paths; however, with
multiple consumers and producers, coordination among the nodes is required to
efficiently use the network resources. Network coding (NC) is a promising tool
to address this issue. The challenge in the case of NC is to be able to get
independent coded content in response to multiple parallel interests by one or
several consumers. In this work, we propose a novel construction called MILIC
(Multiple Interests for Linearly Independent Contents) that impose constraints
on how the replies to interests are coded, intending to get linearly
independent contents in response to multiple interests. Several protocol
variants, called MICN (MILIC-ICN), built on top of NDN (Named Data Networking),
are proposed to integrate these interest constraints and NC of data packets.
Numerical analysis and simulations illustrate that the MILIC construction
performs well and that the MICN protocols are close to optimal throughput on
some scenarios. MICN protocols compare favorably to existing protocols and show
significant benefits when considering the total number of transmitted packets
in the network, and in the case of high link loss rate.
