Forward Error Correction in Sensor Networks

Abstract

In any network, there are two basic methods to recover errorneous packets. One way is to use Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), and another is Forward Error Correction (FEC). Since, in sensor networks, power is scarce and is primarily consumed by wireless transmission and reception, we would prefer to use FEC rather than ARQ. In this paper we determine empirically the error characteristics of wireless transmission signals, and from that, we implement and evaluate different types of encoding schemes that are shown to be successful in reducing the error rates. Key words: sensor networks, forward error correction, ChipCon Radio 1