Segment linear network coding in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has attracted a lot of interest for its wide range of practical applications. The energy-resource limitation of WSN demands transmissions between sensor nodes to be high efficiency. Random linear network coding (RLNC) exploits the broadcast and distributed nature of WSN to improve the throughput of network. The throughput gain brought by RLNC grows up as the generation size increased, while the decoding complexity has a cubic growth, being unacceptable for the energy-resource limited WSN. In this paper, we propose a segment linear network coding (SLNC) scheme which reduces the decoding complexity dramatically through adding constraints to the encoding coefficients and dividing a complex matrix inverse operation into several simple ones at receiver. Proved by theoretical analysis and simulation results, we show that SLNC achieves a fairly low decoding complexity with seldom increase on the overhead of network.