RECODAN: An efficient redundancy coding-based data transmission scheme for wireless sensor networks

Data transmission reliability is under serious consideration for use in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and retransmission is the most common method for ensuring data reliability. However, in recent years, some researchers have discovered that redundancy coding is superior to retransmission in many respects. In this article, we propose an efficient REdundancy COding-based Data trAnsmission scheme for WSNs (RECODAN), which guarantees reliable data transmission through hybrid retransmission in hop-by-hop. RECODAN uses a selective Reed-Solomon coding to reduce the process of encoding in an intermediate node, and uses an adaptive codeword retransmission to improve data reliability. Furthermore, in this article, we use the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process to predict the packet reception rate, which can decrease unnecessary redundancy in code delivery and increase network lifetime. Our simulation experiments and results show that RECODAN can significantly improve data transmission reliability, and can improve task time delay and energy consumption, particularly in situations of low packet reception rate.