Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are often driven by batteries when they are used in gathering data or ubiquitous computing.Therefore,energy consumption is the key issue in designing wireless sensor network system.When network coding is applied,intermediate nodes may send out data packets that are linear by minimizing the number of transmissions required to communicate a given amount of information across the wireless sensor networks.The less the number of transmissions is,the less the energy consumption will be.The transmission process and the principle of saving energy in wireless sensor networks based on network coding are analyzed,and the energy efficienly of the proposed solution using network coding is compared with non-network coding solution.The results show that the transmission power can be reduced efficiently by network coding,and it will benefit the lifetime of wireless sensor networks.

Key words: wireless sensor networks, network coding, power minimization, energy efficienly