Performance Analysis of Node Cooperation with Network Coding in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose and investigate a simple, low-complexity cooperative protocol that exploits network coding (NC)within a lossy wireless sensor network (WSN). The scenario under consideration is as follows: M sensor nodes send their information packet to a common destination node D over a wireless block-fading Rayleigh channels between users and each user and D, represented by a packet-level Finite State Markov Chain (FSMC) channel model. The traffic among nodes and destination can be significantly reduced resulting in energy savings if a node overhears and combines the packets from different nodes in a simple and deterministic way before it forwards them to the destination. The key problem we try to address is how to efficiently combine the packets at each node within the designed two stage cooperative NC protocol.