Performance evaluation of interleaving techniques for IEEE 802.15.4 transmissions

Abstract: In the wireless sensor network, the WLAN interference, multi-path fading andattenuation are the main reason for packets’ corruption. Forward errorcorrection is one of the methods for error mitigation. Many coding methods aredesigned to improve the reliability of wireless channel. However, none of thesecoding methods could handle the burst errors that widely exist in wirelesschannel and are mainly responsible for packet corruption. Interleaving isintroduced to robust these coding methods and make those corrupted packetsavailable to be corrected by spreading the burst errors. The Reed-Solomon(15,7) block code is used as the forwarding error correction in theseexperiments. In this paper, seven different symbol interleaving will be firstlysimulated in the Matlab platform under four different channels to evaluate theirpacket error rate performances. Then, two of the seven interleaving with betterperformance and the simplest interleaving algorithm, general block interleavingwill be implemented in the TinyOS platform, and they will be compared witheach other from packet error rate, interleaving time and memory consumptionaspects. Experiments show that, for theoretical channel, interleaving plays animportant role to enhance the capability to correct the corrupted packets exceptfor Rayleigh channel, in which the impact of interleaving is generally slight.Meanwhile for the channel under IEEE 802.11b/g interference, interleavingenhance more than 10% PER in the receiver. However for MFA channel, theenhancement is slight, only 1.85%. Convolutional interleaving has the best PERperformance in AWGN channel and the channel with deterministic SER, whilematrix interleaving has the lowest PER in WLAN affected channel. In thelatency and memory consumption aspect, For the same packet length, generalblock interleaving has the shortest interleaving time while matrix interleavinghas the longest. In the same interleaving algorithm, the execution time becomeslonger with growth of packet size. Within the same interleaving method, thelonger the packet size is, the more memory that would be consumed. Under thesame interleaving length, general block interleaving consumes least memoryand convolutional interleaving has the largest memory consumption.