Low complexity distributed reliability for Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider the distributed wireless sensor network (WSN) reliability problem with the introduction of minimal complexity at sensor nodes. Under the proposed scheme, intermediate sensor nodes, acting as relays to the base station, partially decode the information packets as they traverse the multi-hop wireless network. Nodes collaborate, in a distributed pair-wise manner to allocate the processing budget to individual nodes and obtain near optimal performance. We make recommendations for fast convergence with minimal burden on intermediate nodes. We show that the proposed scheme achieves much better performance than end-to-end channel coding. We use iteratively decodable low density parity check (LDPC) codes to demonstrate the efficiency of our technique.