DAG-Coder: Directed Acyclic Graph Based Network Coding for Reliable Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor devices are usually powered with limited non-rechargeable batteries. This energy can easily be depleted when no wise consumption procedures are used, leaving the sensor non-functional. As most of the energy is consumed during the transmission of data, developing efficient data manipulation and transmission approaches is crucial and still an open problem that attracts the attention of many research groups. In this article a directed acyclic graph (DAG) based dissemination approach, where clustering and network coding techniques are applied, is proposed. As a main goal, this work aims at improving the network reliability (ensure recovery of lost packets), while minimizing energy consumption and balancing load at gateways. The proposed approach is compared to state-of-art approaches in terms of network reliability and energy saving trade-off. Experimental results demonstrate the strong performance of the proposed work.