Efficient data collection in wireless sensor networks by applying network coding

Considering a wireless sensor network with optimal mobile sink track along which data are transmitted to the nodes, a fraction of nodes in the area of interest generate data packets and send them to the sink. Usually the single path routing is adopted in such scenarios which may cause unnecessary transmissions. We address the problem of how to collect these packets efficiently by using network coding technique. Network coding is a kind of in network computation which has many advantages over traditional routing, such as providing higher network throughput, using bandwidth efficiently and balancing the traffic. In this paper, we propose a data collection strategy by using network coding for efficient data collection in event driven WSNs and explore its performance through theoretical analysis. We present a strategy for network coding algorithm which can guarantee the successful decoding for all the encoded packets. Specifically, our numerical results show the decrease in the total number of transmissions by applying network coding than that by using the single path routing. Also numerical results indicate that the delivery packets rate is significantly improved as the increase of the link loss rate comparing network coding we adopt with single path routing.