PER evaluation of K-min Viterbi decoder for wireless sensors

Abstract

Wireless transceiver is a mandatory component of any kind of wireless sensors. Inside wireless transceiver, Viterbi decoder (VD) is needed to improve the decoding performance of the transceiver. In this paper, we propose a low complexity Viterbi decoder algorithm for wireless sensors that aim to support Internet of Thing (IoT) applications. Our algorithm is named as K-min Viterbi decoder because only K nodes with minimum distance at each layer of the decoder are selected for processing. To evaluate packet error rate (PER) performance of the algorithm, we develop an 802.11ah simulator that uses 64-state VD. The PER performance of our K-min VD in relation with several factors such as channel type, decoder's trace-back length, and modulation type, has been evaluated. Our analysis shows that the proposed K-min VD achieves the same PER performance as the conventional VD does, while its complexity is smaller by approximately 12.8 times to 21.3 times. Therefore, K-min VD is suitable for IoT wireless sensors which must be small size, low-cost, and low-power consumption.