Network Coding-Based Protection of Many-to-One Wireless Flows

This paper addresses the problem of survivability of many-to-one flows in wireless networks, such as Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Traditional protection schemes are either resource-hungry like the (1+1) protection scheme, or introduce a delay and interrupt the network operation like the (1 : N) protection scheme. In this paper, the authors present a network coding-based protection technique that overcomes the deficiencies of the traditional schemes. They derive and prove the necessary and sufficient conditions for their solution on a restricted network topology.