Effect of network coding on buffer management in wireless sensor network

In resource constrained wireless sensor networks (WSN), it is highly desirable to make efficient use of available buffer. Hence for the WSN designed for the monitoring applications, buffer management is a key requirement at sensor nodes. We have proposed an efficient buffer management scheme based on random linear network coding as the in-network processing on data packets. With buffer allocation from source to sink path, our scheme distributes the buffer requirement among the nodes on the path. Further in the case of a packet loss, the proposed scheme recovers packet from available information distributed on the path from source to sink. We have compared our scheme with conventional buffer management scheme. Results show that network coding based buffer management scheme has better buffer availability with less redundancy and reduced loss recovery cost.