Extending Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks using Forward Error Correction

Communication between nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is susceptible to transmission errors caused by low signal strength or interference. These errors manifest themselves as lost or corrupt packets. This often leads to retransmission, which in turn results in increased power consumption reducing node and network lifetime. In this paper, a convolution code FEC with Viterbi decoding on Mica2 nodes was implemented and evaluated to explore the possibility of extending the lifetime of a degrading WSN. Results were presented which suggest that our approach could be used in a WSN when increasing distance and channel noise degrade the network