Hybrid Solution: A FEC Algorithm for Fault Tolerant Routing in Sensor Networks

We study the characteristics of wireless sensor networks (WSN) and present a lightweight FEC coding algorithm combined with a smart fault tolerant routing scheme in this paper. The proposed coding-decoding algorithm is based on XOR operation and requires very little computation and storage space, which are critical for WSN. There are few existing channel coding algorithms (FEC) put forward for use in sensor networks, and they are not very suitable, due to their high computing, storage and delay cost. Further more, normal FEC coding algorithms are not flexible enough to suit the variable states in WSN. We adopt a cross-layer design wherein higher network layers use information about packet loss to adjust the coding level according to the dynamics of the network. And our routing scheme has the ability to discover and select robust paths to reliably relay data packets. Simulation result shows that our coding algorithm and self-adaptive routing scheme perform better than existing schemes.