Optimizing the code rate for achieving energy-efficient wireless communications

Error correcting coding is a well-known technique for reducing the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) needed to attain a given bit error-rate. Nevertheless, this reduction comes at the cost of extra energy consumption introduced by the baseband processing required for encoding and decoding the data. No complete analysis of the trade-off between coding gain and baseband consumption of communications over wireless channels has been reported so far. In this paper, we study the energy-consumption of BCH codes with various code rates over AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels. Our results show that codes with low code rate are optimal for performing long-range communications, while is better to use less coding redundancy when the transmission distance is short. Our results also show that the transmission range of a low-power communication device can be increased up to 25% for AWGN channels and up to 300% for Rayleigh fading channels by using an optimized BCH code.