Reliable and energy-efficient transmission scheme based on error correction codes and clustered routing protocol for WSN

WSNs are getting to occupy a large part of daily life for many applications such as healthcare, military, environment, home, and so forth. Sensor nodes in WSNs are powered by small batteries and can be deployed in a hostile environment, where replacing or recharging them is difficult. As a result, WSNs are energy-constrained. In this context, several routing protocols are proposed to extend the network lifetime and optimize energy consumption. However, routing protocols can not guarantee communication reliability. To achieve the high-reliability requirements of data transmitted using the routing protocols, using channel coding in the physical layer is proposed. For this purpose, a comparative study is carried out in this work by comparing two different modern coding techniques, namely LDPC and RS coding. The objective of this paper is to determine which coding scheme better satisfies the requirements of clustered routing protocols, in particular the LEACH protocol. Simulations have shown that LDPC coding achieves good reliability performance over RS when implemented with the LEACH protocol by increasing the coding gain by 62.5% at a BER of 10−2.