Abstract: Although network coding is an effective technology to improve the performance of multicast communication, encoding of node brings the additional overhead. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a network coding optimization model under the framework of algebraic network coding. And an algorithm called the MCN (Minimizing Coding Nodes) is proposed, which is based on the improved genetic algorithm. In MCN some new methods are introduced into the simple generic algorithm in order to avoid locality problem and to reduce optimization time. The experimental results show that MCN is effective and it runs faster, and that the output network coding scheme requires less coding nodes. Moreover, when it is applied to the actual meaningful network, it can guarantee the same network throughput, and much lower average delay and network overhead as the traditional network.