Channel coding and interleaving in Industrial WSN: abiding to timing constraints and bit error nature

Forward Error Correction is a preemptive manner of improving communication reliability. Albeit not a part of IEEE 802.15.4-2006 standard, its application in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks has been widely considered. Nevertheless, this study is the first performance analysis on real error traces with sufficiently lightweight channel codes, with respect to IEEE 802.15.4-2006 and industrial wireless communication timing constraints. Based on these constraints and bit error properties from the collected traces, the use of Reed-Solomon (15,7) block code is suggested, which can be implemented in software. Experiments show that bit error nature on links affected by multipath fading and attenuation in industrial environments is such that RS(15,7) can correct ≥95% of erroneously received packets, without the necessity for interleaving. On links under IEEE 802.11 interference, typically up to 50% of corrupted packets can be recovered by combining RS(15,7) with symbol interleaving, which has proven to be more effective than its bit counterpart. The optimal interleaving depth is found empirically and it is shown that simple bit-interleaved 1/3 repetition code achieves at least 90% of correcting performance of RS(15,7) code on uninterfered links that operate ≥10 dB above the sensitivity threshold.