Adaptive Forward Error Correction Scheme to Improve Data Reliability in Solar-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks

The data-link layer takes charge of reliable inter-node communication in open systems interconnection (OSI) reference model. Generally, in the environment of wireless sensor network (WSN) where errors are frequently occurred, the forward error correction (FEC) method is mainly used at this data-link layer. However, the FEC method requires more amount of energy consumption as it has higher ability of error correction rate, thus reducing the network lifetime seriously. Meanwhile, as the energy is regularly recharged in the solar-powered WSN (in contrast with the battery-based WSN), a greater amount of energy than that required for fundamental operation of nodes might exist in the node. By utilizing this surplus energy efficiently, the proposed energy-aware FEC method can reduce the data loss rate without any decrement of network lifetime. This method uses a trade-off relationship between the energy and data loss rate by adjusting the parity length in the FEC method according to a state of energy in each node. The performance of the proposed scheme is verified through the simulation.