This article surveys all known fields of network coding theory and leads the reader through the antecedents of the network coding theory to the most recent results, considering also information theory and matroid theory. By focusing on providing ideas and not formulas, this survey is both fitted for the taste of readers who are mathematically oriented and newcomers to the area. Additionally, this survey also includes an innovative and clear graph representation of the most prominent literature on network coding theory, its relevance and evolution from the very beginning till today.

Cooperative spectrum sensing is envisaged to increase reliability in cognitive radio networks. Several users cooperate to detect the availability of a wireless channel. In this framework, some malicious users may affect the decisions taken by the cognitive users by providing false information, introducing spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF). In this paper, the effect of multiple malicious users on the energy efficiency of a cognitive radio network is given. A low-overhead security protocol is proposed to address SSDF attacks under a trade-off between energy efficiency and security. An analytical study is provided to set the optimal number of security bits required to maximize energy efficiency. Simulation results show a considerable improvement on the achievable energy efficiency, and the optimal number of bits explicitly depends on the selected fusion rule, the number of malicious users and the number of legitimate users.

The new IEEE 802.21 standard specifies link layer intelligence and other related network information to upper layers in order to optimize handovers between networks of different types, such as WiMAX, Wi-Fi, and 3GPP. This paper makes a short description of 802.21 standard, how it is implemented in ns-2, and the signaling used in a handover between WiMAX and Wi-Fi. The paper also proposes a novel and very simple approach to determine the expected number of handovers in an ns-2 simulation and also evaluates the reliability and scalability of ns-2 when simulating 802.21 scenarios with multiple nodes.