Implementing autonomous network coding for wireless sensor network applications

Wireless sensor network (WSN) motes are resource constrained devices. Especially, bandwidth and energy are scarce resources. Therefore, lots of effort is put into the optimization of low-power networking protocols. While network control overhead is an issue for many to most of such protocols, we present an approach that is virtually overhead-free. We introduce the implementation of an autonomous network coding implementation that can be implemented for existing applications and added over existing routing mechanisms with no need to change the application or networking protocols. We discuss and carefully evaluate the approach for applicability and gain according to the most prominent optimization metrics for WSN networking protocols. Especially, we consider the comparison of autonomous network coding to state-of-the-art collection protocols and multipath routing. The completely autonomously acting network coding plug-in implementation is profiled to conserve up to 29 % of the messages that need to be sent locally without the need for centralized network control.