A Packet-Interleaving Scheme Using RS Code for Burst Errors in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a packet-interleaving scheme (PIS) for increasing packet reliability under burst errors in wireless sensor networks (WSN). In a WSN, packet errors could occur due to weak signal strength or interference. These erroneous packets have to be retransmitted, which will increase network load substantially. The proposed PIS, encoding data using Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, can classify data into two different types: high-reliability-required (HRR) data and non-HRR data. An HRR packet is encoded with a short RS symbol, while a non-HRR packet with a long RS symbol. When an HRR and a non-HRR packet arrive at a sensor, they are interleaved on a symbol-by-symbol basis. Thus, the effect of burst errors (BE) is dispersed and consequently the uncorrectable HRR packets can be reduced. For the purpose of evaluation, two models, the uniform bit-error model (UBEM) and the on-off bit-error model (OBEM), are built to analyze the packet uncorrectable probability. In the evaluation, we first change the lengths of BE, then we vary the shift positions in a BE period, and finally we increase the number of correctable symbols to observe the superiority of the proposed PIS in reducing packet uncorrectable probability.