On Forward Error Correction in IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are used in many applications, for example industrial applications, automatic control applications, monitoring applications, to name but a few. Although WSN can employ different standards in order to achieve short range wireless communication, the mainstream of the market is toadopt the low-power, low-rate IEEE 802.15.4 standard. However, this standard does not specify any block codes on the Physical layer (PHY) and the MAC sublayer. Reliability and energy efficiency are two important metrics used to evaluate the WSN performance. In order to enhance the reliability of the WSN performance, schemes such as Forward Error Correction (FEC) and HybridAutomatic Repeat-reQuest (HARQ) can be introduced on the PHY and MACsublayer when transmitting signals. However, this will reduce the energy efficiency of the WSN. In order to investigate what does affect the reliability and energy efficiency, this thesis has been conducted with the assistance of Matlab simulations, which simulate different transmission schemes proposed by the authors. Based on the simulations, both the reliability and energy efficiency can be evaluated and the results are illustrated for both metrics. The objective of this thesis is to determine a scheme that is able to meet these metric requirements.