This dissertation is directed towards improving the performance of 5G Wireless Fronthaul Networks and Wireless Sensor Networks, as measured by reliability, fault recovery time, energy consumption, efficiency, and security of transmissions, beyond what is achievable with conventional error control technology. To achieve these ambitious goals, the research is focused on novel applications of networking techniques, such as Diversity Coding, where a feedforward network design uses forward error control across spatially diverse paths to enable reliable wireless networking with minimal delay, in a wide variety of application scenarios. These applications include Cloud-Radio Access Networks (C-RANs), which is an emerging 5G wireless network architecture, where Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) are connected to the centralized Baseband Unit (BBU) via fronthaul networks, to enable near-instantaneous recovery from link/node failures. In addition, the ability of Diversity Coding to recover from multiple simultaneous link failures is demonstrated in many network scenarios. Furthermore, the ability of Diversity Coding to enable significantly simpler and thus lower-cost routing than other types of restoration techniques is demonstrated. Achieving high throughput for broadcasting/multicasting applications, with the required level of reliability is critical for the efficient operation of 5G wireless infrastructure networks. To improve the performance of C-RAN networks, a novel technology, Diversity and Network Coding (DC-NC), which synergistically combines Diversity Coding and Network Coding, is introduced. Application of DC-NC to several 5G fronthaul networks, enables these networks to provide high throughput and near-instant recovery in the presence of link and node failures. Also, the application of DC-NC coding to enhance the performance of downlink Joint Transmission-Coordinated Multi Point (JT-CoMP) in 5G wireless fronthaul C-RANs is demonstrated. In all these scenarios, it is shown that DC-NC coding can provide efficient transmission and reduce the resource consumption in the network by about one-third for broadcasting/multicasting applications, while simultaneously enabling near-instantaneous latency in recovery from multiple link/node failures in fronthaul networks. In addition, it is shown by applying the DC-NC coding, the number of redundant links that uses to provide the required level of reliability, which is an important metric to evaluate any protection system, is reduced by about 30%-40% when compared to that of Diversity Coding. With the additional goal of further reducing of the recovery time from multiple link/node failures and maximizing the network reliability, DC-NC coding is further improved to be able to tolerate multiple, simultaneous link failures with less computational complexity and lower energy consumption. This is accomplished by modifying Triangular Network Coding (TNC) and synergistically combining TNC with Diversity Coding to create enhanced DC-NC (eDC-NC), that is applied to Fog computing-based Radio Access Networks (F-RAN) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the redundancy percentage for protecting against n link failures is inversely related to the number of source data streams, which illustrates the scalability of eDC-NC coding. Solutions to enable synchronized broadcasting are proposed for different situations. The ability of eDC-NC coding scheme to provide efficient and secure broadcasting for 5G wireless F-RAN fronthaul networks is also demonstrated. The security of the broadcasting data streams can be obtained more efficiently than standardized methods such as Secure Multicasting using Secret (Shared) Key Cryptography.