Network lifetime enhancement in wireless sensor network using network coding

Power 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 power minimization technique. Network coding is a new research area that may have interesting applications in practical networking systems. With network coding, intermediate nodes may send out packets that are linear combinations of previously received information. Thus network coding reduces the power consumption by minimizing the number of transmissions required to communicate a given amount of information across the network. Hence it improves the lifetime of the network when network coding is being applied. This paper explains what is network coding and the benefits of network coding. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed solution is more efficient than no-network coding solution while still meeting the required lifetime constraints.