The Potential of Using Network Coding with Geographical Forwarding Routing for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

In this paper, the potential of using Network Coding to enhance the performance of geographical forwarding routing for multimedia wireless sensor networks is investigated. The preliminary results of this study illustrate that Network Coding has the potential to significantly improve the average network capacity, in terms of the available number of concurrent transmission paths, which leads to several other benefits on different performance metrics such as the throughput per data flow, the end-to-end delay, and the network lifetime. The preliminary results demonstrate that, having the capability of encoding n packets at each relay node on the data path between the source nodes and the sink node can potentially improve the average network capacity by a factor bounded by n, given that the cost of performing the network coding process at each relay node, in terms of time and energy consumption, is less than that of transmitting each packet individually.