A first step towards energy management for network coding in wireless sensor networks

Network coding is a suitable mean to come up against the effects of crossing information flows in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where these areas are heavily impacted in terms of channel bandwidth, message delay and energy balance. While only few work exists that deduces general rules for resource conservation with network coding, no approach exists that formalizes the impact of scheduling network coding to optimize persistent storage efficiency. We present a novel approach that can be used for networkwide energy-aware behavior. We consider the usage of persistent memory and discuss the access patterns' impact for state-of-the-art WSN technologies. Our approach works for static mesh-structured WSNs. We show how to locally inhibit network information flows to rebalance the load on energy conservation among different motes. Our results from theory and simulation show how to scale the concept to arbitrarily large WSNs.