Efficient data gathering with network coding coupled compressed sensing for wireless sensor networks

This study presents an efficient communication scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for data gathering, called Network Coding Coupled Compressed Sensing (NCCS). We employ network coding to adapt to the dynamic nature of WSNs, such as moving obstacles and link failure. Measurements from sensor networks are often correlated because sensors nodes nearby observe the contiguous phenomenon and the operation of the Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) scheme is similar to that of the random projection in Compressed Sensing (CS). Therefore, we introduce compressed sensing into the Network Coding (NC), to prevent all-or-nothing impact on NC. NCCS simultaneously transmits and encodes specific packets of sensor measurements to form random projections for CS recovery. CS technology guarantees that the data gathered at all nodes are accurately reconstructed with a high probability from a very small number of proj ections which is less than the total number of source nodes in the network. Our simulation results show that, only less than half number of packets is required to reconstruct measurements with reasonable quality compared with the traditional network coding schemes. Also, NCCS increases the data gathering efficiency by over 20% compared to the conventional NC scheme.