Experimental assessment of LNC‐based cooperative communication schemes using commercial off‐the‐shelf wireless sensor network nodes

Abstract

Summary The use of wireless sensor network nodes to support reliable communication exposes some challenging issues. For instance, the reduced available bandwidth combined with an error‐prone communication medium impairs the provision of reliable communication services. Network coding techniques can be useful to mitigate some of these issues, where multiple message groups can be combined into single messages and retransmitted to their destinations, improving the network reliability and reducing the bandwidth consumption. However, an effective use of network coding requires the availability of wireless sensor network nodes able to encode/decode messages within the required timing constraints. This paper reports an experimental assessment of commercial off‐the‐shelf wireless sensor network nodes, running a set of network coding encoding/decoding tasks. The assessed nodes range from the high‐performance ARM Cortex‐M7 to the low capability Arduino Uno platforms, including some of the most popular ARM Cortex and ATMEL AVR processors. The performed experimental assessment demonstrates that highly complex network coding techniques (with fields as large as F28) can be efficiently implemented on a wide range of wireless sensor network nodes, including ARM Cortex, ATMEL AVR, and Arduino Uno platforms, smoothing some relevant reliable communication implementation issues.

Combining Network Coding and Retransmission Techniques to Improve the Communication Reliability of Wireless Sensor Network

“…The coefficients are selected randomly and sent in the coded packet header. The authors considered a finite field of 2 8 . In addition, the authors consider that in each hop, between the source node and the destination node, the packets are recoded.…”

“…In the retransmission step, the relay node C i intersects its list of listened messages (L C i ), with the list of messages lost by the coordinator (L LostCoord ) and with the list of messages heard from the auxiliary nodes (L Aux j and L Aux j+1 ), according to Equation (8).…”

“…The result of Equation ( 8) are the common messages that the coordinator needs and that the relay node and the two auxiliary nodes also have. The auxiliary nodes of each relay also perform the intersection operation presented in Equation (8). The list of messages resulting from Equation (8) (I) is ordered by the Id of the nodes that sent them.…”

“…In this context, techniques that improve communication reliability are of major importance. Among them, cooperative communication has received attention from researchers [7,8].…”