A Network Coding based Probabilistic Routing scheme for Wireless Sensor Network

Network coding scheme improves throughput and reliability in a Wireless Sensor Network. A straight forward broadcasting by flooding in a wireless sensor network is very costly and reduce the network coding benefit. The packet loss probability increases due to contention and collision which is referred as broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we have proposed a Network Coding based Probabilistic Routing scheme (NCPR) for wireless sensor network that alleviate the broadcast storm problem. The NCPR scheme also improves the network coding gain which is defined as the ratio of the native data packets transmitted with network coding to the number of data packets transmitted without network coding using same number of transmissions. Furthermore, for a large scale network the clusters are restricted to some geographical area and they want to share information with each other (battlefield scenario). In NCPR, the decoding operation can be carried at the intermediate nodes rather than only at the sink node; both intra-cluster and inter-cluster information sharing is considered. The protocol also gives protection to the sensor nodes against link failure. Simulation results are presented, which show high degree of coding gain than the flooding scheme.