Experimental assessment of LNC‐based cooperative communication schemes using commercial off‐the‐shelf wireless sensor network nodes

Summary The use of wireless sensor network nodes to support reliable communication exposes some challenging issues. For instance, the reduced available bandwidth combined with an error‐prone communication medium impairs the provision of reliable communication services. Network coding techniques can be useful to mitigate some of these issues, where multiple message groups can be combined into single messages and retransmitted to their destinations, improving the network reliability and reducing the bandwidth consumption. However, an effective use of network coding requires the availability of wireless sensor network nodes able to encode/decode messages within the required timing constraints. This paper reports an experimental assessment of commercial off‐the‐shelf wireless sensor network nodes, running a set of network coding encoding/decoding tasks. The assessed nodes range from the high‐performance ARM Cortex‐M7 to the low capability Arduino Uno platforms, including some of the most popular ARM Cortex and ATMEL AVR processors. The performed experimental assessment demonstrates that highly complex network coding techniques (with fields as large as F28) can be efficiently implemented on a wide range of wireless sensor network nodes, including ARM Cortex, ATMEL AVR, and Arduino Uno platforms, smoothing some relevant reliable communication implementation issues. Linear network coding (LNC) and cooperative communication techniques can be useful to support reliable communication in a wireless sensor network (WSN). However, an effective use of LNC‐based communication techniques imposes the availability of WSN nodes able to perform the encoding/decoding tasks within the required timing constraints. This paper reports an experimental assessment of commercial off‐the‐shelf (COTS) WSN nodes running LNC techniques.