Co-operative routing for wireless sensor networks using network coding

Omni-directional two-way traffic flow using flooding leads to broadcast storm problem in a wireless sensor network (WSN). The probabilistic routing protocols help in reducing the broadcast storm but lack reliability. Network coding is a new paradigm that allows an intermediate node to encode incoming packets which improves the bandwidth efficiency and reliability of the WSN. A network coding-based probabilistic routing (NCPR) scheme has been proposed, which is energy-efficient, reliable and alleviates the broadcast storm problem in a clustered WSN. The focus of this work is to design the network coding-based procedures for probabilistic routing protocols. In NCPR, a sensor node initialises a transmission process in a WSN cluster by transmitting a packet from its sensed queue. Each neighbour node encodes its received packet with its sensed packet using XOR network coding and transmits the coded packet with certain probability. Three network coding-based procedures have been proposed for encoding and decoding of packets in intra-cluster and inter-cluster communications by distributing roles among the sensor nodes. It has been shown that the NCPR scheme provides better energy efficiency and reliability compared to the probabilistic routing and pure flooding schemes.