Reliable Cooperative Communications Based on Random Network Coding in Multi-Hop Relay WSNs

Reliability is an important issue when designing wireless sensor networks (WSNs), since the WSNs need to work for a long time without manual interventions. Many techniques, such as multiple input multiple output systems and low density parity check codes, have been devised to improve the reliability of computer networks and wireless networks. However, these techniques are too complicated to apply in the WSNs due to the extremely limited resources of the wireless sensor nodes. Hence, it is a hot research topic to design a reliable scheme with low complexity in the WSNs. In recent years, there are a few schemes proposed to improve transmission reliability in the WSNs, such as multipath routing and cooperative transmission. In this paper, a network coding-based cooperative communications scheme (NCCC) is proposed. Combining the advantages of both cooperative communications and network coding, the NCCC can improve the packet loss-resistant capability through network coding and the communications fail-resistant capability through cooperative communications. In the NCCC, coding vectors in network coding procedure are chosen from a finite field randomly, which makes the NCCC easy to be implemented in the resource-limited sensor nodes. Theoretical analyses and experimental results show that the NCCC can achieve a good reliability performance at the cost of neglectable delay.