Bingxin Shen

Date of Award

8-2007

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Campus-Only Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor

Ali Abedi

Second Committee Member

Donald M. Hummels

Third Committee Member

Mauricio Pereira da Cunha

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4 standard has become a popular technology for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in recent years. However, due to lack of error correction codes, it does not provide a robust communication link in noisy environments. This leads to a high packet loss for distances above 15 ft which limits the communication range of the nodes, and increases the number of wireless sensors required to cover a specific region. In this thesis, a simple error correction scheme is proposed to improve the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the standard. Several coding schemes have been compared with the overall goal of reduced complexity and maximized performance. The proposed code is optimized in both Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel and frequency-flat Rayleigh fading channel. The effect of different channel models on the coding scheme is also discussed. It is shown that overall power consumption for a coded single hop network can be less than its uncoded multi-hop counterpart. The main advantage of this approach is in the simplicity of its implementation. The result of this research can be applied to either lower the BER or decrease the power consumption of the nodes. This will increase the communication range and therefore reduce the number of nodes required to cover a specific region of interest.

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