Network coding-based multipath routing for energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks

This article studies the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks with network coding-based multipath routing (NCMR). The employed multipath model is braided multipath model, and the network coding scheme is random linear network coding. Braided multiple paths to the sink node are established for each source node, and the packets encoded at source nodes are transmitted on the braided multipath network. Then, intermediate nodes re-encode the received packets and forward the new packets to next cluster. Finally, the sink node decodes the packets received from different paths and recovers the original data. When network coding is combined with multipath routing, the number of required routes and the total times of transmission in sensor networks are reduced, which leads energy consumption of NCMR lower than that of traditional multipath routing, and this is proved by the theoretical analysis results in this article. Meanwhile, results of the analysis show that NCMR provides more reliability. Extensive simulations are carried out, and the results are consistent with those of the theoretical analysis. Moreover, based on the study of the influence of different network parameters (e.g., number of hops, number of paths) on the performance of sensor networks, an optimal combination scheme of different parameters are proposed, which makes the network accomplish transmissions with less resource. Finally, in order to study the robustness of NCMR, some simulation experiments are carried out under special conditions such as interference on channels with memory, congested environments, and failed nodes, which show that NCMR is more effective in adapting to these scenarios.