Performance analysis of error detection and correction code for wireless sensor networks

Recent advances in wireless communications and electronics have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, self-organizational, multifunctional wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks can be applied to a wide range of application areas including heath, military and homeland security, environment, industry and commercial, and home. A typical wireless sensor network consists of one or more sink nodes and a large number of sensor nodes scattered in a sensor field. Each of these sensor nodes is capable to collect the data and relay the data back to the sink through a multi-hop architecture. The key challenge in sensor networks is to overcome the energy constraint since each sensor node has limited power. Hence, it is important to minimize the energy used to transmit packets over wireless links; The data transmitted from the sensor nodes are vulnerable to be corrupted by errors induced by noisy channels and other factors. Hence it is necessary to provide a proper error control scheme to reduce the bit error rate (BER) to a desired level without sacrificing other performance. Energy required for error control code has a direct impact on battery power consumption. Since high error rates are inevitable in the wireless environment, energy efficient error detection and correction scheme is vital in wireless sensor networks. However, in the literature, limited work has been focused on the study of energy efficient error control scheme; This thesis is focused on energy-efficient error detection and correction schemes for wireless sensor networks. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)