Energy-efficient communications is crucial for wireless sensor networks(WSN) where energy consumption is constrained. The transmission and reception energy can be saved by applying network coding to many wireless communications systems. In this paper,we present a coded cooperation scheme which employs network coding to WSN. In the scheme,the partner node forwards the combination of the source data and its own data instead of sending the source data alone. Afterward,both of the system block error rates(BLERs) and energy performance are evaluated. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme has higher energy efficiency. When Noise power spectral density is-171dBm/Hz,the energy consumption of the coded cooperation scheme is 81.1% lower than that of the single-path scheme,43.9% lower than that of the cooperation scheme to reach the target average BLER of 10-2. When the channel condition is getting worse,the energy saving effect is more obvious.
