Implementation of Network Coding in XDK Sensors

Abstract

The data collection has become more important for the industrial world in the last years. The data collected can be used for a large variety of purposes, as detecting fires and intruders, controlling machines’ behavior or simply controlling the environmental regulation of the heating or humidifiers. This work aims to implement and test the first Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) using XDKc small wireless sensors created by Bosch GmbH, that have been used for gathering environmental data and exploiting the benefits of network coding. We introduce a simple routing protocol that allows the nodes to determine the useful packets, enabling them to collaborate with each other to route their measurements to the sink. Thanks to the network coding implementation, we will get some of the advantages, such as high reliability and ordered delivery, using the UDP protocol over wireless links even when the channel conditions are adverse. The proposed network coding scheme will implemented the finite field GF(2), which does not require high computational capabilities, as it only needs to use the XOR operation for encoding and decoding the packets. Moreover, the use of network coding takes advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium, reduces the packet transmissions, has the potential of increasing the traffic balancing, therefore the nodes’ lifetime, which makes it perfect for the WSN world. Our implementation results will prove that the XDK sensors are capable of using network coding with small fields and small generation sizes. Finally we will present the future lines of work to improve the performance of the test bed, its utility and make its use and future updates more convenient for the users and the developers.