On the Cascading Data Collection Mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks

Inspired by the idea of network coding, we propose a cascading data collection (CDC) mechanism to reliably gather sensor data without any structural information. In order to send data back to the sink in the CDC mechanism, sensor nodes wait cascadingly based on their hops to the sink. The intermediate node stores the innovative received data from its farther neighboring nodes and sends out a packet carrying the received information as much as possible when its forwarding timer expires. Simulation results show the effects of various network parameters on the performance of the CDC mechanism and we find it can lead to a much lower energy costs and send data reliably compared with similar mechanisms.