Communication protocol with network coding in long-chain wireless sensor network

With the requirement of real-time and reliability on monitoring power transmission lines, this paper proposes a cooperative communication protocol with network coding in long-chain wireless sensor networks (WSN). The protocol makes full use of channel broadcast characteristics and cooperative communication. It applies the classical butterfly structure of network coding among the successive three hops in the chain network. The opportunistic routing and network coding in the protocol obtain the receiving diversity gain and the coding gain for the long-chain topology of transmission line. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol improves the reliability of data transmission and system throughput.