Confidential Convergecast Based on Random Linear Network Coding for the Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network

The multi-hop wireless sensor network (WSN) suffers from energy limitation and eavesdropping attacks. We propose a simple and energy-efficient convergecast mechanism using inter-flow random linear network coding that can provide confidentiality to the multi-hop WSN. Our scheme consists of two steps, constructing a logical tree of sensor nodes rooted at the sink node, with using the Bloom filter, and transmitting sensory data encoded by sensor nodes along the logical tree upward to the sink where the encoded data are decoded according to our proposed multi-hop network coding (MHNC) mechanism. We conducted simulations using OMNET++ CASTALIA-3.3 framework and validated that MHNC outperforms the conventional mechanism in terms of packet delivery ratio, data delivery time and energy efficiency.