Network Coding for Wireless Sensor Network Cluster over Rayleigh Fading Channel: Finite State Markov Chain

Abstract

Network Coding (NC) is confirmed to be power and bandwidth efficient technique, because of the less number of transmitted packets over the network. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is usually power limited network application, and in many scenarios it is power and bandwidth limited application. The proposed scenario in this paper applies the advantages of NC over WSN to obtain such power and bandwidth efficient WSN. To take the advantages of NC over the one of the most needed applications i.e. , WSN, we come up to what this paper is discussing. We consider a WSN (or its cluster) that consists of M nodes that transmit equal-length information packets to a common destination node D over wireless Rayleigh block-fading channel where the instantaneous SNR is assumed to be constant over a single packet transmission period. Finite-State packet level Markov chain (FSMC) model is applied to give the channel more practical aspect. The simulation results showed that applying NC over the WSN cluster improved the channel bandwidth significantly by decreasing the number of the Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), resulting in improving the power consumption significantly. The results are collected for different transmission distances to evaluate the behavior to the proposed scenario with regard to the bath losses effect.