Efficient network coding for power saving in wireless sensor networks

Power is one of the most critical resources in wireless sensor networks and packet transmission is a very energy-consuming action for sensor nodes. Network coding has the potential to reduce the number of packets transmitted by encoding multiple packets together in transmission. To the best of our knowledge, little work applies the practical network coding for power saving in wireless sensor networks and AdapCode is by now the most promising one among them. However, AdapCode works based only on partial of all actual neighbors of a node in coding process, which may waste some potential coding opportunities. In this paper, thus, we enhance the AdapCode by deploying an energy efficient neighbor discovery protocol to find out all the neighbors of a node. Our objective is to develop a more efficient coding scheme for wireless sensor networks to achieve more power saving from using network coding.