On the Applicability of Network Coding in Wireless Sensor

Networks
Thiemo Voigt

Utz Roedig

Olaf Landsiedel

Swedish Institute of Computer

Science (SICS)
Kista, Sweden

Lancaster University
Great Britain

Chalmers University of
Technology, Sweden
KTH Royal Institute of
Technology, Sweden

thiemo@sics.se

u.roedig@lancaster.ac.uk

Kasun Samarasinghe
Swedish Institute of Computer
Science (SICS)
Kista, Sweden

kasun@sics.se

ola@chalmers.se
Mahesh Bogadi Shankar
Prasad
Swedish Institute of Computer
Science (SICS)
Kista, Sweden

mahesh@sics.se

ABSTRACT
Network coding is a novel concept for improving network
capacity. This additional capacity may be used to increase
throughput or reliability. Also in wireless networks, network
coding has been proposed as a method for improving communication. We present our experience from two studies of
applying network coding in realistic wireless sensor networks
scenarios. As we show, network coding is not as useful in
practical deployments as earlier theoretical work suggested.
We discuss limitations and future opportunities for network
coding in sensor networks.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

C2.1 [Network Architecture and Design]: Wireless communication

General Terms
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords
Wireless sensor networks, network coding

1.

NETWORK CODING IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Network Coding was introduced by Ahlswede et al. [1], proving that it can increase multicast capacity. Since then, it has
been investigated in several dierent networked scenarios
which demand dierent trac characteristics. Most previous research has focused on theoretical aspects of applying

network coding to sensor networks. There are, however,

also more practical examples of applying network coding in
wireless networks. Network coding has, for example, demonstrated its usefulness in the general networking domain (e.g.,
Katti et al. [2]). Hou et al. have proposed AdapCode [3], a
network-coded variant of the Deluge protocol [4]. Aoun et
al. specically target real-time wireless sensor networks [5].
They use network coding together with packet skipping to
improve on-time goodput in real-time WSNs. Their topology, however, is not applicable to data collection.
While network coding for data dissemination can increase
reliability, it is harder to apply network coding for convergecast, probably the most important trac paradigm in wireless sensor networks where data is collected from multiple
sources and transported to one or more data sinks.
We have worked on two eorts to apply network coding in
wireless sensor networks. In the rst study, we have applied
network coding to extend GinMAC, a state-of-the-art MAC
protocol [6]. In the second, we have tried to apply network
coding for reliable and low delay communication in network
with very high packet loss rates [7]. In the second case it
has turned out that network coding cannot live up to the expectations while in the rst case in all scenarios we studied,
network coding can be replaced with simple overhearing and
the retransmission of the lost packets which avoids the complexity of network coding. In the remainder of this paper,
we detail our studies and discuss limitations and usefulness
of network coding in sensor networks.

2.

NETWORK CODING IN GINMAC

We have applied network coding in GinMAC [6], the MAC

layer of the GINSENG system designed for industrial monitoring and control. In industrial process automation and
control networks it is common that many nodes monitor the
same production process and are hence deployed in close
proximity to each other. Thus, most nodes are in interference range of all other nodes in the network and many nodes
are also capable of overhearing packets which makes it eas-

packet transmissions are received).

Figure 1: Schedules without Network Coding (0 and

1 retransmissions

Figure 2: Schedules with Network Coding (NC). NC

compresses the schedule while still enabling retransmissions.

ier to apply network coding. GinMAC is a single channel

state of the art TDMA-based MAC layer for performancecontrolled sensor networks [8]. GinMAC uses an oine process to dimension a network before deployment. The heart
of the dimensioned network is a TDMA schedule with an
epoch length consisting of E slots. There are three types of
slots, namely basic slots for transmission (TX) and reception
(RX), additional slots for retransmissions (RTX) to increase
reliability and unused slots to decrease the duty cycle. The
schedule determines latency, power consumption and reliability. The latter is increased by adding more retransmission
slots.
We employ overhearing as a mechanism for tuning network
reliability and latency. Due to external interference a node
may not be able to deliver a packet to a parent node. However, a neighbouring node may be able to overhear the packet
and then try to deliver the packet on its behalf. Thus,
instead of the sender retransmitting packets, neighbouring
nodes that overhear the initial transmission take care of the
retransmission. Obviously, a node that overhears packets
will now need capacity to transmit these. In order to avoid
allocation of additional transmission slots we propose network coding to combine several overheard packets into a single retransmission. Thus, we use overhearing and network
coding for retransmissions reducing the overall number of
transmission slots.
Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the resulting schedules with
and without network coding for a binary tree with the leave
nodes A and B. In the example node A has the rst transmission slot. With network coding node B overhears As
transmission in this transmission slot. Thereafter, node B
transmits its own packet in its allocated slot. Finally, node B
uses the retransmission slot in which it transmits a network
coded packet that contains the information of the packet
transmitted by A and B. For example, packets from A and
B can be combined using simple binary XOR coding. The
root node will receive A and Bs packets if one original transmission is received and the network coded retransmission
is received (both packets are also received if both original

As a result we have now constructed a schedule in which

both nodes A and B have a way to retransmit a packet
despite that we provision only one retransmission slot. Thus,
with network coding less slots are provisioned while we still
provide a retransmission option for all nodes. The slight
drop in reliability compared to the original scheme with one
retransmission may be well acceptable for some application
scenarios since a gain in transmission latency is achieved as
the schedule is compressed. From Figure 1 and Figure 2 we
can infer that the schedule compression for the binary tree
is 3 : 4 (0.75). In our previous work we have shown that we
achieve approximately similar error packet reception rates
for GinMAC with and without network coding and that for
high packet loss rates we can also achieve a reduction in
power consumption [6].

3.

NETWORK CODING FOR RELIABLE,

LOW-DELAY COMMUNICATION

Many sensor network applications, in particular sensor actuator networks, require a certain delay and reliability to enable control loops on top of a wireless sensor network. Network coding promises highly reliable communication. We
discuss our lessons learned from integrating it into a collection tree application [7]. While network coding increased
reliability in some scenarios, we noticed the following two
key limitations: (1) strongly increased delay, and (2) high
overhead due to limited lack of adaptability:
Delay: Commonly, WSN applications operate at low data
rates: often, a node generates packets in the order minutes
and the whole network trac is in the order of a couple
of packets per second. However, to achieve a robust interleaving and mixing of packets for network coding, one
commonly applies a coding scheme across multiple packets.
Thus, nodes have to wait for these packets to accumulate,
which signicantly increases delay. For example, in todays
collection protocols such as CTP [9] or Contiki Collect [10],
one sees typical network delays in the order of milliseconds.
However, waiting for enough packets for coding to accumulate takes a couple of seconds. Thus, the delay added by
network coding is several order of magnitude higher than
the network delay. Hence, network coding seems only benecial when the applications do not have delay constraints.
Overhead and lack of adaptability: As network coding
is an end-to-end scheme, its feedback is limited when compared to per-hop acknowledgments. Thus, it is dicult for
the source to adjust its coding rate to changing network conditions. Reecting this, we had to employ a redundancy level
in our coding scheme that matches the maximum expected
loss rate. As a result, this approach adds a large overhead
compared to the average scenario. Especially, when keeping
in mind, that links in WSNs are often bursty [11], leading
to high, short-term packet losses.

4.

LIMITATIONS AND APPLICABILITY OF

NETWORK CODING

In the previous section we have already outlined some limitations of applying network coding for data collection. While
our results with GinMAC (see Section 2) are encouraging,

we later realized that we do not need network coding in this

scenario. If either packet A or packet B is lost, we can simply
retransmit the lost packet. If both packets A and B are lost,
then network coding does not help either and it is better to
retransmit only one of the lost packets. We have not found
larger topologies where we could use network coding while
it was not possible to do the same with overhearing and
standard packet retransmissions only. For the single-sink
scenario, we have found one use of network coding: when
we do not apply acknowledgements which might be useful
when the schedule needs to be compressed to a minimum
but still some retransmissions should be enabled. In particular for trees where each node can have more than one
sibling (e.g., ternary trees), network coding may be useful
when acknowledgements are not enabled. Furthermore, in
multi-sink scenarios, similar to the original network coding
scenarios, we expect network coding to be benecial.

5.

CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we have demonstrated some drawbacks of applying network coding in real-world sensor network scenarios. While we have pointed out some limitations we have
also shown some potential use cases.

6.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research leading to these results has received funding

from the European Communitys Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n 224282
(GINSENG), SSF and VR. This work has been partially
supported by CONET, the Cooperating Objects Network of
Excellence.

7.

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