Energy Efficient Data Gathering with Network Coding for Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

This paper presents the introduction of network coding technique into the data gathering process of cluster-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which possess the limited energy and computing resources. The network coding can indirectly reduce the amount of energy consumed for the transmissions from the cluster heads to the base station. An energyefficient 2-hop path selection protocol is also applied to further reduce the energy consumption for data transmission from sensor nodes to a cluster head node. We set up a computer simulation in MATLAB to see the performance of our proposed scheme. Energy consumption and the number of transmissions are used as the performance evaluation metrics. The numerical results show that our proposed scheme can reduce the energy consumption for data transmissions from sensor nodes to the sink and improves the lifetime of the sensor network.