Distributed Systematic Network Coding for Reliable Content Uploading in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Recently, the wireless sensor network paradigm is shifting toward research aimed at enabling the robust delivery of multimedia content. A challenge is to deliver multimedia content with predefined levels of Quality of Service (QoS) under resource constraints such as bandwidth, energy, and delay. In this paper, we propose a distributed systematic network coding (DSNC) scheme for reliable multimedia content uploading over wireless multimedia sensor networks, in which a large number of multimedia sensor nodes upload their own content to a sink through a cluster head node. The design objective is to increase the reliability and bandwidth-efficient utilization in uploading with low decoding complexity. The proposed scheme consists of two phases: in the first phase, each sensor node distributedly encodes the content into systematic network coding packets and transmits them to the cluster head; then in the second phase, the cluster head encodes all successfully decoded incoming packets from multiple sensor nodes into innovative systematic network coding packets and transmits them to the sink. A bandwidth-efficient and channel-aware error control algorithm is proposed to enhance the bandwidth-efficient utilization by dynamically determining the optimal number of innovative coded packets. For performance analysis and evaluation, we firstly derive the closed-form equations of decoding probability to validate the effectiveness of the proposed uploading scheme. Furthermore, we perform various simulations along with a discussion in terms of three performance metrics: decoding probability, redundancy, and image quality measurement. The analytical and experimental results demonstrate that the performance of our proposed DSNC outperforms the existing uploading schemes.