On Reliable Transmission by Adaptive Network Coding in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), due to scarce resources like energy, computational capability and storage space as well as rapid change in wireless link characteristics such as signal strength, interference, and multi-path propagation, how to provide a reliable data transmission in WSNs while prolonging the network lifetime as long as possible is an important and challenging issue. In general, there are several approaches, e.g., automatic repeat request, multi-path routing and source coding, used for providing reliable data transfer in WSNs. We note that the overhead and performance of such end-to-end single-path approaches are often dominated by some poor-quality links or nodes on the path. That is, these traditional approaches are not able to quickly and properly react in this multi-hop wireless environment. To cope with the above issues, in this work we would like to propose an efficient reliable data transfer scheme with network coding for WSNs. To guarantee expected reliability with appropriate overhead, we not only derive an analytic model to estimate the proper amount of redundancy, but also propose the cluster-based and distributed scheme to dynamically adjust the redundancy at each hop. Through simulations in ns2, our results show that, compared with existing reliable data transfer schemes, our approach can achieve the required reliability with significantly fewer transmissions.