Scalable Redundancy for Sensors-to-Sink Communication

In this paper, we present a new technique that uses deterministic binary network coding in a distributed manner to enhance the resiliency of sensor-to-base information flow against packet loss. First, we show how to use network coding to tolerate a single packet loss, and then we extend the solution to tolerate multiple losses. Moreover, we study the coding efficiency issue and introduce the idea of relative indexing to reduce the coding coefficients overhead. Finally, we show through a simulation study that our approach is highly scalable and performs better as the network size and/or number of sources increases.