Parallel Concatenation vs. Serial Concatenation Turbo Codes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are to a large extent characterized by the sensing, communication and computation constraints of their constituent sensor nodes. Moreover, energy efficient operation is critical, since the nodes are typically powered by batteries or scavenge energy from their environment. Communication over a wireless channel is prone to noise and interference, which causes errors to occur in the received packets. Plain retransmission of erroneous packets requires high amounts of energy from the nodes. Error Correcting Codes (ECCs) are commonly used in communication systems to correct erroneous packets at the receiver, at some additional processing power cost for the decoding process. A strong error correction decoder can however be shifted to the data collecting Base Station-which has more processing power and energy available-to correct errors accumulated over the multi-hop communication path. Turbo Codes are commonly used in wireless communication when high error correction performance is required. Turbo Codes can have a Serial Concatenation or a Parallel Concatenation structure. In this paper we evaluate and compare the performance of both structures when using a Turbo decoder at the Base Station to correct the accumulated errors.