Data recovery in wireless sensor networks using network coding

Abstract

Data transportation over resources constraint and noisy channel of wireless sensor network (WSN) is very challenging in term of guaranteeing the data survival along the transmission. However, with the convergence of different research areas such as routing, source and channel coding techniques, the WSN technology has successfully been tremendously developed. This paper proposes an on-the-fly data recovery (ODR) scheme using network coding in order to enhance the robustness of the network against packet loss. Along with the ODR scheme, the packet loss formulation is presented while a network model for a network coding designed is also introduced namely for erasure channel. The data generated by the sources are transferred to the destination through relay nodes via three transmission paths. In ODR process, the lost packet is recovered by a relay node by listening to the transmission of two adjacent nodes and performing the XOR operation on the listened packets. We provide the analytical study on network coding performance and conducting the simulation experiment to verify it. In the simulation studies, we have also compared the performance of the network using network coding with and without packet recovery. The result shows that the number of packet loss has been reduced significantly using the proposed scheme compared to the network with normal network coding.