Improving transmission reliability in wireless sensor networks using network coding

Wireless sensor networks employed in industrial and other special applications have strict requirements concerning the transmission reliability, delays and energy efficiency. This paper proposes a scalable approach for increasing transmission reliability in wireless sensor networks, based on a cooperative scheme that uses Reed–Solomon codes as network code. The block error rate of the proposed coded transmission technique is analyzed in several scenarios and it is shown that our solution improves the error performance even for high coding rates. The paper proposes also a genetic algorithm based optimization of the network code functionality by selecting the most cooperation capable devices. The proposed network coding based solution is compared with automatic repeat request transmissions from the point of view of the resource usage, which influences the energy efficiency and the transmission delays. The evaluations performed show that network coded transmissions can ensure better error performance with significantly less resources.