A flexible error correction scheme for IEEE 802.15.4-based industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Noise and interference make a substantial impact on wireless transmissions in industrial environments, resulting in frequent erroneous packet deliveries. Existing industrial communication standards adopt the IEEE 802.15.4 specification, which provides no means to correct the detected errors. We propose an IEEE 802.15.4-compliant Forward Error Correction-based approach that can be easily retrofitted into the standard without the need for any kind of interaction with chip manufacturers or standardization bodies. We evaluate the approach on link- and network-level scenarios. Improvement of reliability by using FEC can yield multiple benefits: a reduced number of retransmissions, and lower average latency, to name a few. With respect to the uncoded system, the proposed solution provides identical coding gain as the traditional FEC method, at a significantly lower computational load of decoding.