A study on energy efficient cluster-based network coding protocol for aggregated-data gathering in wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a cluster-based network coding data gathering (CNCDG) protocol used for the aggregated-data gathering scenario in wireless sensor networks, where the sink only wants an aggregated result of all the data sensed from an area. CNCDG integrates cluster-based routings with network coding. It aims to save more energy than flat-based network coding protocols by permitting cluster heads to perform some aggregation so as to reduce the amount of packets transmitted. This paper theoretically analyzes the feasibility of CNCDG and presents its energy consumption function in a regular rectangular grid network, and further demonstrates the fact that CNCDG will be energy efficient in most environments by simulations in random-deployed networks.