While network data transmission was traditionally accomplished via routing, network coding (NC) broke this rule by allowing network nodes to perform linear combinations of the upcoming data packets. Network operations are performed in a specific Galois field of fixed size q. Decoding only involves a Gaussian elimination with the received network-coded packets. However, in practical wireless environments, NC might be susceptible to transmission errors caused by noise, fading, or interference. This drawback is quite problematic for real-time applications, such as multimediacontent delivery, where timing constraints may lead to the reception of an insufficient number of packets and consequently to difficulties in decoding the transmitted sources. At best, some packets can be recovered, while in the worst case, the receiver is unable to recover any of the transmitted packets.In this thesis, we propose joint source-network coding and decoding schemes in the purpose of providing an approximate reconstruction of the source in situations where perfect decoding is not possible. The main motivation comes from the fact that source redundancy can be exploited at the decoder in order to estimate the transmitted packets, even when some of them are missing. The redundancy can be either natural, i.e, already existing, or artificial, i.e, externally introduced.Regarding artificial redundancy, we choose multiple description coding (MDC) as a way of introducing structured correlation among uncorrelated packets. By combining MDC and NC, we aim to ensure a reconstruction quality that improves gradually with the number of received network-coded packets. We consider two different approaches for generating descriptions. The first technique consists in generating multiple descriptions via a real-valued frame expansion applied at the source before quantization. Data recovery is then achieved via the solution of a mixed integerlinear problem. The second technique uses a correlating transform in some Galois field in order to generate descriptions, and decoding involves a simple Gaussian elimination. Such schemes are particularly interesting for multimedia contents delivery, such as video streaming, where quality increases with the number of received descriptions.Another application of such schemes would be multicasting or broadcasting data towards mobile terminals experiencing different channel conditions. The channel is modeled as a binary symmetric channel (BSC) and we study the effect on the decoding quality for both proposed schemes. Performance comparison with a traditional NC scheme is also provided.Concerning natural redundancy, a typical scenario would be a wireless sensor network, where geographically distributed sources capture spatially correlated measures. We propose a scheme that aims at exploiting this spatial redundancy, and provide an estimation of the transmitted measurement samples via the solution of an integer quadratic problem. The obtained reconstruction quality is compared with the one provided by a classical NC scheme.
