Performance Analysis of Error Control Codes for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the data transmitted from the sensor nodes are vulnerable to corruption by errors induced by noisy channels and other factors. Hence it is necessary to provide a proper error control scheme to reduce the bit error rate (BER). Due to the stringent energy constraint in sensor networks, it is vital to use energy efficient error control scheme. In this paper, we focus our study on the performance analysis of various error control codes in terms of their BER performance and power consumption on different platforms. In detail, error control codes with different constraints are implemented and simulated using VHDL. Implementation on FPGA and ASIC design is carried out and the energy consumption is measured. The error control performance of these codes is evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER) by transmitting randomly generated data through a Gaussian channel. Based on the study and comparison of the three different error control codes, we identify that binary-BCH codes with ASIC implementation are best suitable for wireless sensor networks