  We study efficient broadcasting for wireless sensor networks, with network
coding. We address this issue for homogeneous sensor networks in the plane. Our
results are based on a simple principle (IREN/IRON), which sets the same rate
on most of the nodes (wireless links) of the network. With this rate selection,
we give a value of the maximum achievable broadcast rate of the source: our
central result is a proof of the value of the min-cut for such networks, viewed
as hypergraphs. Our metric for efficiency is the number of transmissions
necessary to transmit one packet from the source to every destination: we show
that IREN/IRON achieves near optimality for large networks; that is,
asymptotically, nearly every transmission brings new information from the
source to the receiver. As a consequence, network coding asymptotically
outperforms any scheme that does not use network coding.
