BER performance analysis of an on-off keying based minimum energy coding for energy constrained wireless sensor applications

An on-off keying based minimum-energy coding scheme with coherent receiver has been shown to provide better performance than BPSK. This paper presents a closed-form expression of the BER performance of that scheme over an AWGN channel with either a coherent receiver or a noncoherent receiver. In this paper, a more conservative result is obtained due to a better characterization of the average energy per source bit. Our results show that the performance is better than BPSK only when the codeword length is greater than 63. It is shown that hard-decision decoding outperforms BPSK only when the SNR is higher than a certain threshold and that soft-decision decoding outperforms BPSK regardless of the SNR value. Recommendations for practical codeword lengths are also provided.