Error-tolerant non-binary error correction code for low power wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have emerged as revolutionary technology, where hundreds or thousands of small sensor units are distributed over an environment to monitor a certain phenomenon and achieve a certain functionality. These small sensor nodes are capable of sensing, computing, and communicating. Even though their capabilities are limited, their overall behaviour is complex. For decades researchers all over the world have been working on realizing many applications for wireless sensor networks and trying to overcome their issues. As in any new technology several challenges stand as a barrier to the advancement of wireless sensor networks. One important challenge is power consumption since the expected life of a wireless sensor network is determined by the lifetime of its components. In this paper we propose a modification to the Reed-Solomon decoder algorithm in order to reduce its power consumption and thus improve the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. The proposed modification exploits the fact that there exist applications that tolerate errors without totally jeopardizing the integrity of the data. This opens the door for new type of error control codes, namely error-tolerant non-binary error correction codes. Here we explore the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of bit error rate and symbol error rate in comparison to the original algorithm and uncoded data. Also we provide a power saving estimate resulting from implementing such an algorithm.