Error control coding in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are usually a set of battery-supplied small devices. One of the main challenges in deploying WSN is to improve energy-efficiency and lifetime of the nodes while keeping communication reliability. Transmissions over the wireless channel may experience many impairments, like random noise and fading, increasing the bit error rate at reception, causing several retransmissions, and consuming extra energy from the node. In order to minimize the harmful effects of the radio channel, error control strategies using packet retransmission and error correcting codes are commonly utilized. In this work we investigate the trade-off between transmission and processing energy consumption in a sensor node employing convolutional codes. Through this study we can identify and select the appropriate complexity of the error control code to be used in each sensor node, in order to maximize the network lifetime.