Due to the increase in the density and multitude of online real time applications involving group communication which require a certain degree of resiliency, proactive protection of multicast sessions in a network has become prominent. The backbone network providing such a service hence needs to be robust and resilient to failures. In this thesis, we consider the problem of providing fault tolerant operation for such multicast networks that have multiple sources and need to deliver data to pre-defined set of destinations. The data is assumed to be delivered in a highly connected environment with a lot of nodes, e,g., a dense wireless network.

The advent of network coding has enabled us to look at novel ways of providing proactive protection. Our algorithm combines network and erasure coding to present a scheme which can tolerate predefined amount of failures in the paths from the sources to the destinations. This is accomplished by introducing redundancy in the data sent through the various paths. Network coding seeks to optimize the resource usage in the process. For sources that cannot meet the constraints of the scheme, protection is provided at the cost of reduced throughput.