System Modeling for Opportunistic Network-Coded Cooperative Multicast Transmission in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are formed by connected sensors that each have the ability to collect, process, and store environmental information as well as communicate with others via inter-sensor wireless communication. The many-to-one communication pattern used by sensor nodes in most of the data gathering applications leads to such unbalanced energy consumption. Cluster-based protocols attempt to solve this problem by load balancing within the cluster and rotating the job of cluster head every few rounds. In this paper, in order to achieve efficient utilization of wireless resources, we propose an opportunistic network-coded cooperative multicast scheme, which can select appropriate relays by synthetically considering location and instantaneous channel state information to improve the network performance than direct multicast with non additional power consumption.