LPED: Channel diagnostics in WSN through channel coding and symbol error statistics

Three major obstacles to wireless communication are electromagnetic interference, multipath fading and signal attenuation. The former stems mainly from collocated wireless systems operating in the same frequency band, while the latter two originate from physical properties of the environment. Identifying the source of packet corruption and loss is crucial, since the adequate countermeasures for different types of threats are essentially different. This problem is especially pronounced in industrial monitoring and control applications, where IEEE 802.15.4 communication is expected to deliver data within tight deadlines, with minimal packet loss. This work presents the Lightweight Packet Error Discriminator (LPED) that distinguishes between errors caused by multipath fading and attenuation, and those inflicted by IEEE 802.11 interference. LPED uses Forward Error Correction to determine the symbol error positions inside erroneously received packets and calculates the error density, which is then fed to a discriminator for error source classification. The statistical constituents of LPED are obtained from an extensive measurement campaign in two different types of industrial environments. The classifier incurs no overhead and in ≥90% of cases a single packet is sufficient for a correct channel diagnosis. Experiments show that LPED accelerates link diagnostics by at least 190%, compared to the relevant state-of-the-art approaches.