Energy efficient multipath routing using network coding in wireless sensor networks

Multipath is a sought-after mechanism to achieve reliability along the error-prone channel in wireless sensor networks. However, this technique is not energy efficient since sensor networks are subject to strict resource constraints. In this paper, we propose an energy aware method to combine multipath routing with practical network coding technique. Through this method, we can guarantee the same reliability while reduce much energy consumption by decreasing the number of paths needed to delivery data. This method only needs little metadata overhead and some small-scale linear operations. Simulations under different circumstances verify the theoretical results. The paper also discusses other advantages of network coding in multi-receiver case to illustrate our future work.