On the design of coding framework for energy efficient and reliable multi-hop sensor networks

Energy efficiency and reliability are the key requirements for wireless sensor network (WSN), as sensor nodes are expected to be stand-alone for a long time and communication to be successfully carried out. Communication is the most energy consuming process in WSN, especially in lossy environment. In multi-hop WSN, packets are more susceptible to transmission errors which worsens the communication reliability and energy consumption. Therefore, coding schemes are mandatory to cover the channel impairments and save the transmission energy. In this work, we propose an adaptive coding (AC) scheme that can be adapted with the channel state and inter-node distances in order to decode and correct the packets or request for retransmissions. The proposed scheme has proved to be energy efficient and adaptive compared to Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) and Forward Error Correction (FEC) schemes.