AdapCode: Adaptive Network Coding for Code Updates in Wireless Sensor Networks

Code updates, such as those for debugging purposes, are frequent and expensive in the early development stages of wireless sensor network applications. The authors propose AdapCode, a reliable data dissemination protocol that uses adaptive network coding to reduce broadcast traffic in the process of code updates. Packets on every node are coded by linear combination and decoded by Gaussian elimination. The core idea in AdapCode is to adaptively change the coding scheme according to the link quality. The evaluation shows that AdapCode uses up to 40% less packets than Deluge in large networks.