An Optimized Degree Strategy for Persistent Sensor Network Data Distribution

Nodes of wireless sensor networks (WSN) may fail easily due to the lack of energy or disaster scenarios. Such failures can severely reduce the persistence and collection efficiency of sensed data. Network coding technology can be employed to enhance the data persistence of wireless sensor network, but it may cause serious "cliff effect" in decoding process. In this paper, the influence of prioritized coding degree distribution strategy on cliff effect is observed, and a distributed storage algorithm PLTD-Alpha is proposed. With PLTD-Alpha, the data in sensor network nodes present a trend that their degree distribution increase along with the degree level predefined, and the persistent data packets can be submitted to the sink node according to its degree in order. Experiment results show that PLTD-Alpha can greatly improve the data collection and decoding efficiency of sensor network while data persistence is not notably affected.