Towards Energy Efficient Adaptive Error Control in Indoor WSN: A Fuzzy Logic Based Approach

In populated indoor environments, the radio signal quality is heavily influenced by channel impairments caused by movement of people, obstacles, or radio interferences. In such environments, high packet drop rates lead to frequent retransmissions and increased energy consumption of resource-restricted wireless nodes. To overcome this, we propose a novel Forward Error Correction (FEC) based adaptive error control strategy that employs a cascaded fuzzy inference system to combat communication unreliability. The strategy unifies various heterogeneous metrics such as signal-to-noise ratio, line-of-sight/non-line-of-sight detection and ACK/NACK to closely estimate the low-power links' quality and based on that, selects an appropriate FEC code to protect packet transmissions. Numerical evaluations are carried out using a realistic indoor fading channel model and IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz modulation format. The performance results obtained from a comparative analysis with static and Adaptive FEC Code Control schemes (AFECCC) conclude that the proposed adaptive scheme guarantees better trade-off (packet error rate and energy-efficiency) for indoor WSN applications.