Efficient Multihop Broadcasting With Network Coding in Duty-Cycled Wireless Sensor Networks (NET)

In this article, we focus on the issue of multihop broadcasting for a batch of packets in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (WSNs). When the conventional single-hop broadcasting scheme with network coding is applied to multihop scenario, a forwarder has to occupy its surrounding wireless medium until all its one-hop forwarders decode the received packets. Thus, forwarding of neighboring forwarders is significantly delayed. We propose an efficient multihop broadcasting with network coding (EMBNC) by selecting downstream forwarders in a two-hop manner. Encoded packets are delivered from a forwarder to its downstream forwarders with the cooperation of auxiliary nodes. A forwarder terminates its forwarding once auxiliary nodes collectively receive enough packets, which efficiently decreases time to occupy wireless medium. Auxiliary nodes can also receive more encoded packets when downstream forwarders are transmitting. Simulation results show EMBNC achieves high performance in terms of broadcast delay, energy consumption, and average duty cycle.