Reliable and Low Latency Transmission in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

The major advantages with Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) in process automation are cable cost reduction, enhanced flexibility and enabling new emerging applications such as wireless control. However, transmission over the wireless channel is prone to noise and interference which causes packets to be erroneous received at the receiver node. To improve the link reliability in lossy channels, error correcting codes are commonly used. In this paper we discuss the use of forward error correction (FEC) codes in IWSN in order not only to improve the link reliability but also to reduce the number of retransmissions in harsh industrial environments. We propose a FEC scheme suitable for MAC level protection where the packet is divided into groups and encoded using systematic FEC codes. We have implemented different FEC codes in a typical IWSN chip to evaluate memory consumption and to ensure that we are not violating the strict timing rules for acknowledgment. Our results show that some FEC codes are suitable to be implemented in a typical IWSN node while several fails due to large memory footprint or to long encoding and decoding time