Embedded Forward Error Control Technique (EFECT) for Low-Rate Real-Time Communications

In order to alleviate development cost, many application-oriented wireless networks make use of the off-the- shelf wireless standards such as the Bluetooth, IEEE802.15.4 (Zigbee), and IEEE802.11, which are originally developed for personal area networks (PAN) and local area networks (LAN). Examples of such applications are medical monitoring and control. These applications do not require data rates as high as these standards, but instead they require higher reliability with lower latency. As a means to meet such requirements based on these standards, we propose an efficient error control technique named Embedded Forward Error Control Technique (EFECT). This technique enables an additional forward error correction to the existing standards without any additional costs. Some design guidelines based on Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and sphere packing bound are proposed and, as a specific example, achievable gains by applying the EFECT are studied for the Bluetooth standard.