Minimizing energy consumption for cooperative network and diversity coded sensor networks

In this paper, we present an approach to minimize the energy consumption of multihop wireless packet networks, while achieving the required level of reliability. We consider networks that use Cooperative Network Coding (CNC), which is a synergistic combination of Cooperative Communications and Network Coding. Our approach is to optimize and balance the use of forward error control, error detection, and retransmissions at the packet level for these networks. Additionally, we introduce Cooperative Diversity Coding (CDC), which is a novel means to code the information packets, with the aim of minimizing the energy consumed for coding operations. The performance of CDC is similar to CNC in terms of the probability of successful reception at the destination and expected number of correctly received information packets at the destination. However, CDC requires less energy at the source node because of its implementation simplicity. Achieving minimal energy consumption, with the required level of reliability is critical for the optimum functioning of many wireless sensor and body area networks. For representative applications, the optimized CDC or CNC network achieves ≥ 25% energy savings compared to the baseline CNC scheme.