How Network Coding Benefits Converge-Cast in Wireless Sensor Networks

Network coding is one of the most promising techniques to increase the reliability and reduce the energy consumption for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, most of the previous works mainly focus on the network coding for multi-cast or uni-cast in WSNs, in spite of the fact that the converge-cast is the most common communication style in WSNs. In this paper, we investigate, for the first time as far as we know, the feasibility of acquiring network coding benefits in converge-cast, and we present that with the ubiquitous convergent structures self-organized during converge-casting in the network, the reliability benefits can be obtained by applying linear network coding. We theoretically derive the network coding benefits obtained in a general convergent structure, and simulations are conducted to validate our theoretical analysis. The results reveal that the network coding can improve the network reliability considerably.