Opportunistic Network Coding for Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) continuously enhance processing capabilities and miniaturization. However, there exists a design gap to energy and bandwidth availability. Especially battery technology cannot keep pace with demands of novel versatile services. A common approach for conserving channel capacity and energy is optimizing power-aware routing and different kind of duty cycling (DC) and harvesting technology. While these optimizations are usually dealt with separately, we provide a novel framework with integrating and analyzing these different aspects in a practical TinyOS implementation at the same time. We implement the essential combination of energy harvesting aware routing (EHAR) together with radio and application DC and we add the novel approach of opportunistic network coding (ONC) for WSNs. We give detailed analysis of the applicability of application-level DC compared to low-power MAC and power save modes for state-of-the-art WSN and harvesting system hardware. We elaborate static and dynamic aspects of EHAR, scalable network coding (SNC) and ONC. Combining analytical models, comprehensive simulation and detailed highly accurate hardware power profiling measurement results, we demonstrate energy conservation from 13% to 50% when applying ONC and SNC.