Cost Minimization for Multi-Source Multi-Sink Network Coding

Network coding is a novel technique used to improve the performance of multicast network by performing encoding operation at intermediate nodes. In the implementation of network coding, the multi-source network coding is the hottest spot that many researchers focusing on, but still no many researches have been done on it, especially in minimizing the complexity of the network. The complexity of the system depends on the number of encoding nodes in the network and the size of the finite field (GF). In this paper, we address the problem of complexity from number of encoding nodes point of view, and reduce the complexity via reducing the number of encoding nodes. We applied this algorithm to random networks and topologies; we conclude that the complexity is reduced effectively.