Error correction in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Lack of efficient error correction codes (ECC) in homogeneous multi-hop sensor networks contributes to their poor bit error rate (BER) performance in wireless environments where high levels of noise and interference are inevitable. However two-tiered single-hop configurations utilizing a few powerful super-nodes capable of handing ECC may have lower BER over certain channels. In this article, performance of uncoded IEEE 802.15.4 standard and proposed coded scheme have been compared over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channel models. A simple ECC is proposed to improve the BER performance of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks over different channel models while maintaining low complexity. The proposed code is optimized in both AWGN channel and frequency-flat Rayleigh fading channel. The effect of different channel models on the coding scheme is also discussed. It is shown that overall power consumption for a coded single-hop network can be less than its multi-hop counterpart.