Energy efficient soft-decision error control in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficient reliable communication over unpredictable wireless medium is a major challenge for resource constrained wireless sensor nodes employed in process/environment control application. In this paper, we suggest the soft decision decoding (SDD) based advanced Forward Error Correction (FEC) scheme for low power distributed sensor nodes. The proposed BCH (Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem) based adaptive Chase-2 decoding scheme offers attractive energy benefits as compared to hard-decision decoding (HDD). The reduced decoding complexity is obtained by limiting the codeword search space and fewer algebraic operations than standard chase-2. The realistic environmental scenario incorporating path loss, Rayleigh fading and additive white Gaussian noise has been considered to investigate the performance of the proposed scheme. A detailed comparative analysis is carried out with HDD of BCH codes using IEEE 802.15.4 compliant widely used MicaZ node parameters. The simulation results indicate that for low power WSN, proposed SDD based adaptive scheme could offer better tradeoff between energy and reliability than HDD schemes.