Data dissemination in wireless sensor networks with instantly decodable network coding

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely applied in monitoring and control of environment parameters. It is sometimes necessary to disseminate data through wireless links after they are deployed in order to adjust configuration parameters of sensors or distribute management commands and queries to sensors. Several approaches have been proposed recently for data dissemination in WSNs. However, none of these approaches achieves both high efficiency and low complexity simultaneously. To address this problem, cluster-tree based network architecture, which divides a WSN into hierarchies and clusters is proposed. Upon this architecture, data is delivered from base station to all sensors in clusters hierarchy by hierarchy. In each cluster, father broadcasts data to all his children with instantly decodable network coding (IDNC), and a novel scheme targeting to maximize total transmission gain (MTTG) is proposed. This scheme employs a new packet scheduling algorithm to select IDNC packets, which uses weight status feedback matrix (WSFM) directly. Analysis and simulation results indicate that the transmission efficiency approximate to the best existing approach maximum weight clique, but with much lower computational overhead. Hence, the energy efficiency achieves both in data transmission and processing.