ANCR—An Adaptive Network Coding Routing Scheme for WSNs with Different-Success-Rate Links

As the underlying infrastructure of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many applications. Network coding is a technique in WSNs to combine multiple channels of data in one transmission, wherever possible, to save node’s energy as well as increase the network throughput. So far most works on network coding are based on two assumptions to determine coding opportunities: (1) All the links in the network have the same transmission success rate; (2) Each link is bidirectional, and has the same transmission success rate on both ways. However, these assumptions may not be true in many actual WSNs—the wireless links among nodes are often subject to all kinds of disturbance, obstruction, etc., and may transmit with different success rates. This paper proposes a new routing strategy, named Adaptive Network Coding Routing (ANCR). ANCR firstly establishes a routing path with the traditional network coding routing (NCR), and then applies the neighborhood search algorithm to adaptively determine nodes’ coding opportunities based on the links’ transmission success rates, with the target of reducing the total number of transmission. The simulation results show that, in WSNs with different-success-rate links, ANCR can reduce the network delay by about 50%, and increase the network throughput by about 67%, compared with the traditional NCR.