This summer (June 14th to 21st 2013) I participated in the PhD course “Network Coding: Theory and Applications” as an lecturer. The course was structured into three parts:

• The first part provides the participants with the theoretical tools necessary to understand the field of network coding and focuses on the underlying algebraic principles. It will also introduce distributed randomized network codes and discuss their properties, including throughput, robustness, delay, and security. We will not assume any prior knowledge of advanced algebra or optimization.
• The second part of the PhD course gives an overview of the different application areas and discusses, which types of networking problems are amenable to network coding (and which aren’t). In particular, it covers practical algorithms for data gathering in sensor networks, routing in wireless mesh networks, peer-to-peer networking and content distribution, streaming applications, etc.
• The third part will discuss implementation aspects in real-world systems, ranging from core network routers all the way down to mobile phones and tiny sensor nodes. The constraints imposed by these devices in terms of available memory and computing power may differ by several orders of magnitude. As a consequence, the encoding and decoding algorithms need to be carefully adapted to the specific problem at hand.

You can find more information about the course on the course webpage.