Energy Minimization through Network Coding for Lifetime Constrained Wireless Networks

Energy management is the key issue in the design and operation of wireless network applications like sensor networks, pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing where the network is primarily driven by battery-powered embedded devices. This paper studies network coding as an energy minimization technique. Network coding reduces the energy consumption by minimizing the number of transmissions required to communicate a given amount of information across the network. However, aggressive application of network coding adversely affects the network lifetime. We illustrate this trade off in this paper, and show that the existing throughput based network coding approaches cannot be applied to energy-constrained networks. Specifically, we address the following routing problem. Given a set of traffic demands the goal is to route the demands across the network with the objective of minimizing the total energy consumption while providing guarantees on the lifetime of individual nodes. This paper studies multi-path variation of the above routing problem. We present analytical formulations to solve the problem optimally. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed solution is 35% more energy efficient than no-network- coding solution while still meeting required lifetime constraints.