::ABSTRACT::

The essence of network coding is a paradigm shift to allow coding at intermediate nodes between the source and the receivers in one or multiple communication sessions. The fundamental insight of network coding is that information to be transmitted from the source in a session can be inferred, or decoded, by the intended receivers, and does not have to be transmitted verbatim. Network coding has been recently proposed in information theory as a new dimension of the information multicast problem that helps achieve optimal transmission rate or cost. End hosts in overlay networks are natural candidates to perform network coding, due to its available computational capabilities.