A Flexible Error Correction Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4-based Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Noise and interference make a substantial impacton wireless transmissions in industrial environments, resulting infrequent erroneous packet deliveries. Existing industrial communication standards adopt the IEEE 802.15.4 specification, which provides no means to correct the detected errors. We propose an IEEE 802.15.4-compliant Forward Error Correction-basedapproach that can be easily retrofitted into the standard withoutthe need for any kind of interaction with chip manufacturers orstandardization bodies. We evaluate the approach on link- and network-level scenarios. Improvement of reliability by using FEC can yield multiple benefits: a reduced number of retransmissions,and lower average latency, to name a few. With respect to the uncoded system, the proposed solution provides identical codinggain as the traditional FEC method, at a significantly lower computational load of decoding.
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