Using network coding to improve robustness and persistence for data transmission in sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks used for some scenarios such as military, industrial monitoring etc., reliable data transmission faces a number of challenges, such as link interferences and sensor nodes failures. In addition, the networks are often deployed in a non-configuration paradigm, where data collection and transmission must be initiated immediately. In this paper, we explore to use network coding technique to improve robustness and persistence for data transmission in wireless sensor networks, where packet loss due to link interferences and/or node failure. We develop a network coding framework called Network Coding for Data Persistence (NCDP), aiming at increasing the amount of information that can be recovered at the sink node at any point in time. We conduct simulation experiments based on Contiki platform to evaluate the performance of NCDP and numerical results show that NCDP can recover significantly more data in the presence of link interferences and/or node failures than conventional data transmission schemes.