Combining network coding and compressed sensing for error correction in wireless sensor networks

As the spatial and temporal correlations of sensor readings are common in wireless sensor networks, motivated by these features and the drawbacks of network coding (NC), we introduce compressed sensing (CS) into NC scheme and construct a cooperating coding mechanism, which performs over different data fields with a compatible transformation measure for the combination of NC and CS. This cooperating coding scheme can reduce the amount of redundant information transmission significantly, because the temporal and spatial correlations are explored fully. Meanwhile, the erasures and errors are considered simultaneously in relay transmission process; a NC decoding for error control is proposed to correct the erasures and errors. Although the decoding error of NC is existent, this error can be further reduced by the reconstruction process of CS; as a result, the relative recovery error is small enough in the sink. Finally, the reliability and performance analyses confirm that the proposed cooperating coding scheme obtains considerable compression gain as compared with conventional coding scheme of NC and transmits information reliably with high recovery precision. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.