Realization And Analysis Of Linear Network Coding-based Convergecast Scheme In Wireless Sensor Networks

Network coding has been concentrated on in recent years, and it canimprove the reliability and efficiency of data transmission, and it has beenwidely applied in broadcast, multicast and unicast. However the studies ofnetwork coding in convergecast scheme in wireless sensor networks are still atthe stage of theory and simulation. When applying network coding in realisticnetwork, the issues, such as nodes’ synchronization, overhead control andlinear independent coding coefficient, should also be taken into consideration.In order to investigate the effect of network coding on traditionalconvergecast, in this paper, a network coding-based convergecast scheme isrealized and applied to realistic wireless sensor networks. For eliminating as faras possible the interference of other factors in large scale converge structure,the most basic converge structures are adopted, and the scale of the structure islimited below four. Just a network coding layer is added to the traditionalconvergecast model to realize network coding in this paper, and originalstructure and topology needn’t to be changed, so the network coding can beused to realistic network. To synchronize all the nodes in the network andeffectively control the overhead, TDMA schedules with global timesynchronization are employed. Linear network coding is used to performencoding operation, and gaussian elimination is used to decode.Plenty of experiments in practical hardware platform are conducted andthe performances on collection rate and energy consumption are evaluatedunder different link delivery rations and network scales with the traditionalconvergecast as the baseline. The results show that network coding is certain tointroduce benefits in case of poor link quality. Nevertheless, it is inferior to the traditional scheme when the wireless link delivery ratio is high enough due tothe conscious overhearing and the prerequisite of successful decoding. Theresults of this paper will put forward some new ideas of how to apply networkcoding efficiently in convergecast scheme, and the ideas have important actualsignificance and practicality.