Network Coded Transmission in a Wireless Grid Network with an Energy Constraint

In wireless networks, routing based on packet forwarding does hardly yield optimum transmission performance in terms of network utilization and throughput. As an alternative to routing, network coding has been introduced in the recent years, where nodes are mixing the data instead of forwarding. In applications, random linear network coding is the most used method, due to its decentralized mode, and due to preserving the achievability of multicast capacity bounds. In this paper, we study the performance of network coding used for multicast transmission of messages in a wireless grid network with an energy constraint. Several energy saving schemes have been proposed in the literature, but in this study we will focus on duty cycling scheme, in which nodes are not always in on state. The performance is measured as the end-to-end delay, i.e. the duration until each node can decode the message sent by the source, and the CDF of observations is used to make analysis.