Using hardware-based forward error correction to reduce the overall energy consumption of WSNs

Providing an energy-efficient communication scheme is highly desirable in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), however this is often constrained by the processing and energy limitations of the wireless nodes. In this paper, we propose the use of a Turbo Code scheme to increase the robustness and energy efficiency of the communication between end nodes and base stations in single-hop topologies. Using several real-world energy consumption measurements from a widely used WSN platform, we demonstrate the operational environment in which the end-user can take full advantage of the proposed scheme. We propose, for the first time, the use of a reconfigurable hardware device that executes the encoding scheme; this approach can reduce the overall energy consumption of a node by more than 40%, when compared with a Turbo Code scheme implemented in software, as well as by more than 70% when compared with the traditional WSN transmission schemes that do not support any kind of Forward Error Correction.