Patent ID: 7965720

Claim:
A method of selecting a network path for a network coding communication using a network model that includes nodes having at least one source node that transmits data, at least two target nodes that receive the data from the source node, and links between the nodes, the method comprising: initializing a length of each of the links to a predetermined value; searching for an independent path from the source node to one of the target nodes based on the length of each of the links; multiplying a predetermined factor to the length of each of the links used in the independent path that is obtained at the searching; repeating the searching and the multiplying until the searching and the multiplying are performed on all the target nodes; extracting the links and the nodes of the independent path; generating a subgraph having the extracted links and nodes; and selecting the network path based on the subgraph, wherein a minimum number of independent paths is determined for each of the target nodes and the minimum number is set to a dimension number of the data transmitted by the network coding communication.