On the performance of adaptive coding schemes for energy efficient and reliable clustered wireless sensor networks

Clustering is the key for energy constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Energy optimization and communication reliability are the most important consideration in designing efficient clustered WSN. In lossy environment, channel coding is mandatory to ensure reliable and efficient communication. This reliability is compromised by additional energy of coding and decoding in cluster heads. In this paper, we investigated the trade-off between reliability and energy efficiency and proposed adaptive FEC/FWD and FEC/ARQ coding frameworks for clustered WSNs. The proposed schemes consider channel condition and inter-node distance to decide the adequate channel coding usage. Simulation results show that both the proposed frameworks are energy efficient compared to ARQ schemes and FEC schemes, and suitable to prolong the clustered network lifespan as well as improve the reliability.