A Novel Interdependent Source-Channel Coding Technique for Enhanced Energy Efficiency in Communication over Wireless Sensor Networks

Reliable energy efficient information transmission is the primary design objective of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), considering its unique energy and resource constraints. Energy efficiency and bit error rate (BER) performance are the basic criteria to be taken into account while designing an optimal error correction scheme for WSNs. In this paper, a novel energy efficient error control scheme is proposed which minimizes the energy overheads of a typical error control scheme such as additional bits’ transmit energy and encoding/decoding energy, while achieving a better BER performance compared to the standard schemes. The redundant bits’ transmit energy is saved by incorporating compression and coding energy is minimized by employing simpler operations compared to other schemes. Further,the proposed scheme is validated in the context of mica2 motes. The BER performance and energy consumption of the presented scheme are studied and compared with standard error control schemes,such as, Hamming (7, 4) and RS (31, 29). Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology yielding a coding gain (CG) of 4.093 dB with a parameter selection of {30, 7, 2, 5}, in AWGN channel at BER of $$10^{-5}$$10-5, as compared to CG of 0.561 dB and 1.485 dB obtained using Hamming (7, 4) and RS (31, 29), respectively. Further, the standard codes above have a redundancy of 75% and 6.9% respectively while the proposed code with the above parameters achieves a compression of 23.81%. Quantification of energy consumption corresponding to each of the above schemes is also provided to prove the energy efficiency of the proposed technique.