Adopting FEC and packet combining to increase the performance of IWSNs using relaying

Industrial networks can benefit significantly from introduction of wireless communication. However, wireless systems suffer from much higher packet error rates than wired networks do, making it difficult to obtain sufficient reliability within application deadlines. One promising approach to increase the reliability of wireless communication systems without causing excessive additional delays is to exploit spatial diversity. However, often in industrial networks it is not possible to place the relay nodes optimally. Due to this not even relay nodes located close to the source are able to receive the source packets missing at the destination correctly and consequently they cannot assist by relaying. Therefore, to benefit even further from relaying, additional measures should be taken both to increase the number of the correct packets at the relay nodes and to allow the destination to recover more correct packets. Consequently, the focus of this work is schemes enabling relaying, forward-error-correction (FEC) and packet combining without causing additional delays or complexity such that it is possible to use off the shelf transceivers. The results show that the introduction of FEC and packet combining does improve performance by enabling relay nodes to help more often. However, the exact gain depends on the specific FEC scheme used and, in particular, the size of the preamble and other fields that must be left uncoded, but still be received correctly, to be able to use FEC on the received packet.