Energy & throughput tradeoff in WSN with network coding

Recently, network coding emerged as a promising technology that can provide significant improvements in throughput and energy efficiency of wireless networks. Many implementations of network coding in wireless networks, such as COPE, encourage nodes to overhear to improve the coding opportunities so that they can create better opportunities for coding at the transmitter node through overhearing more packages. In this paper, we have shown that all overheard packets are not necessarily useful for coding; thus, a node can go to sleep mode and shutdown the transceiver to have low power consumption. In this approach, nodes use RL mechanism for duty cycling that is aware of network coding; thereby high throughput and low power consumption can be achieved. In this paper, the duty cycling decision problem is formulated as a Markov decision process. The objective is to maximize the expected total reward of overhearing according to the value of overheard packets.