The area of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has long been a field of research in communications, computer science, and power engineering, not mention the diversity of sensors needed to acquire the raw measurements. The reason is that many tradeoffs are required between the lifetime of single nodes owing to their power autonomy, the sensor data flows and coverage (including their coding), the routing schemes, distributed information storage constraints, and the many failure modes on sensors, controllers, transmission nodes, and communication links.

In this short brief, the authors focus on only one of the prevailing aspects, which is linear network coding, itself limited to the mostly theoretical analysis of the combinations of packets flowing at each node of such a WSN. Therefore, the emphasis is on algebraic properties linked to the network graph topology for different information flow options. When implemented, a network coding/decoding scheme entails sending coding vector (or indexing) overhead information along with sensor information packets.

After an introduction, the main three chapters of the brief address in sequence: a centralized approach with global network status available to all nodes, an extension to a distributed approach with binary network coding using local information only, and the transmission scheduling problem. The base result is provided in the second chapter, which is a sufficient and necessary condition on graph subset relative sizes to enable a resilient maximum flow. A few simulation results are provided for small sensor networks.

It remains to be seen which network coding and information routing schemes in real WSNs provide the best contributions to the many complex tradeoffs mentioned above. But this brief gives some theoretical guidelines on WSN topologies in relation to network coding, which may serve several tradeoffs. In this way, associated with a different research focus, this volume would allow for an interesting thesis on more specialized challenges.

Each chapter has a handful of references, and no index is provided.