Tradeoffs of Combining Network Coding and Duty Cycling in WSNs

One approach to reduce the energy consumption of wireless sensors networks (WSNs) is to reduce the cost of idly listening to the channel by disabling (powering down) the transceivers in what is generally known as transceiver duty-cycling. Additionally, one can construct network coding (NC) schemes that allow a single transmissions to be of value to more than one receiver. In this paper, we account for the impact of duty-cycling by modeling the transmissions (for which the intended receiver was not awake) as a form of packet losses. We then use a specifically designed NC scheme to recover those losses. We compare the energy performance and network throughput against continuous (no duty-cycling) operation. The results demonstrate that the particular combination of NC and duty-cycling can provide gains in terms of energy efficiency but these gains are meaningful in particular configurations and under certain constraints.