A Practical Implementation of an Improved Packet Combining Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

An improvement to a recently proposed packet combining procedure based on the use of a CRC is developed. Upon receiving two packets, sent over independent channels, a large error burst may appear in one; however, it is unlikely that the same situation will have occurred for its pair. By making an intelligent choice as to which packet the burst is most likely to be in, and choosing the other packet for correction, the decoding time can be reduced significantly. A practical implementation is provided with real results that show not only can this decision be made correctly on the majority of occasions but, once the correct packet is chosen, an intelligent search operation can be performed further reducing overhead.