Efficient Error Packet Recovery without Redundant Bytes for IEEE 802.15.4 Protocol

Packet corruption is inevitable in wireless sensor networks due to attenuation, multipath, and interference. Existing approaches either require additional energy consumption or sacrifice network throughput by adding redundant bytes in the packet. How to improve network performance without additional energy consumption and payload is still a challenging issue. We explores the characteristics in error packets to design novel recovery algorithms that can directly recover error packets without retransmission and redundant bytes. Specifically, through analyzing the corruptions, we first define two distinct bit error patterns in IEEE 802.15.4 PHY. Based on these analysis, we then propose an Error Packet Recovery (EPR) algorithm based on error characteristic of the adjacent data. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm by conducting experiments in the outdoor environment. The results show that the EPR algorithm increases Packet Reception Rate (PRR) by more than 10%.