Survey of network coding and its benefits in energy saving over wireless sensor networks

Being one of the most important breakthroughs in communication fields, network coding (NC) allows the nodes in the network to code the incoming data as well as transmitting, which enhances the efficiency of network greatly. Especially, for data based wireless sensor networks (WSN) with huge information exchange operations, NC can improve the broadcast efficiency by combining different incoming data together using appropriate coding methods. In this paper, we first give a survey of NC and its benefits applied in WSN. Then, by comparing both the analysis results and the simulation results of different information exchange methods in a cluster structure WSN, it is proved that NC based information exchange method can significantly reduce the time of information exchange, so as to save the energy consumption of each node greatly.