A Survey on Energy Efficient Network Coding for Multi-hop Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Network coding consists of intelligently aggregating data packets by means of binary or linear combinations. Recently, network coding has been proposed as a complementary solution for energy efficient multi-hop routing in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This is because network coding, through the aggregation of packets, considerably reduces the number of transmissions throughout the network. Although numerous network coding techniques for energy efficient routing have been developed in the literature, not much is known about a single survey article reporting on such energy efficient network coding within multi-hop WSNs. As a result, this paper addresses this gap by first classifying and discussing the recent developed energy efficient network coding techniques. The paper then identifies and explains open research opportunities based on analysis of merits of such techniques. This survey aims at providing the reader with a brief and concise idea on the current state-of-art research on network coding mainly focusing on its applications for energy efficient WSNs.