Energy Efficient Coded Communication for IEEE 802.15.4 Compliant Wireless Sensor Networks

The multipath nature of the wireless environment does not provide reliable links for robust communication in wireless senor networks (WSNs). These unreliable links increase the error level to a greater extent and therefore, reduces battery life. Hence, there arises a need for developing energy efficient forward error correction code that avoids more energy consuming Automatic Repeat request (ARQ) scheme used in WSNs to improve link reliability. In this paper, we consider a simple block error correction codes such as cyclic and Bose Chaudhuri Hocquenghem (BCH) codes to be used in IEEE 802.15.4 RF transceiver based sensor nodes. The simulations are performed to measure network parameters such as bit error rate, and energy spent per bit under Rayleigh fading channel environment. It is found that BCH code with code rate of 0.8 provides coding gain of 1.6 dB when compared with cyclic and ARQ schemes and proves to be an energy efficient code among the codes considered.