Analysis of a set of error correcting schemes in multi-hop wireless sensor networks

In multi-hop wireless sensor networks (WSN), the data transmitted from sensor nodes is highly susceptible to error corruption introduced by noisy channels. It is important to use some error correction schemes in order to control the errors introduced and to reduce the number of automatic requests for retransmission. The sensor nodes are typically wireless nodes with limited storage and computational power. Thus the error control schemes should be energy efficient at sensor nodes level. Most of the reported works assume that both encoding and decoding are performed at every node. The idea of this paper is to perform encoding only at the first node and decoding will be done at the base station. We assume that the base station has enough power to run complex decoding algorithms. This paper provides a model for energy consumed and the probability of receiving a correct word for multi-hop WSN at base station when considering a number of coding schemes and hops. The emphasis is on using powerful codes with low complexity encoding. Several powerful codes like Reed-Solomon (RS), list decoded RS codes, multivariate interpolation decoded RS codes (MIDRS) and Hermitian codes are investigated for this scheme. All these codes have very simple encoding based on RS type encoders and we will show that this scheme consumes less power than reported schemes while maintaining a low probability of error.