Energy-Aware Adaptive Cooperative FEC Protocol in MIMO Channel for Wireless Sensor Networks

We propose an adaptive cooperative forward error correction (ACFEC) based on energy efficiency combining Reed-Solomon (RS) coder algorithm and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel technology with monitoring signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in wireless sensor networks. First, we propose a new Markov chain model for FEC based on RS codes and derive the expressions for QoS on the basis of this model, which comprise four metrics: throughput, packet error rate, delay, and energy efficiency. Then, we apply RS codes with the MIMO channel technology to the cross-layer design. Numerical and simulation results show that the joint design of MIMO and adaptive cooperative FEC based on RS codes can achieve considerable spectral efficiency gain, real-time performance, reliability, and energy utility. 1. Introduction There is an unprecedented revolution in wireless sensor networks [1, 2], which was driven by the explosive growth and diversity of wireless application services such as data acquisition and interactive mobile multimedia applications. Various sophisticated applications in wireless sensor networks require different quality of service (QoS) satisfaction. In order to prolong the lifetime of sensor network and achieve better utilization of scarce radio resources, the cooperative communication approach and error control schemes have drawn significant research attention [3–8]. The use of forward error correction (FEC) [9] scheme is a classical solution to improve the reliability of data transmissions in wireless sensor networks. Specially, packet-based Reed-Solomon coder [10] has been already used in many application services of wireless sensor networks. In particular, many of delay-sensitive multimedia services rely on the Reed-Solomon (RS) coder. An adaptive FEC technique was proposed in the literature [3], which dynamically tunes the amount of FEC code based on the arrival of acknowledgement packets and out of control with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or bit error rate from receivers. Our previous study [4] discussed the energy efficiency of FEC on distance and predicts the frame loss rate with GM (1, 1) model, on the basis of adjusting the FEC parameter of sensor nodes. However, energy saving and consumption is a chief issue in wireless sensor networks. So, Gupta et al. [5] proposed an energy-efficient data gathering protocol that uses a prediction-based filtering mechanism to solve the problem of redundant data transmissions. At the same time, Singh et al. [6] proposed an approach of energy-efficient transmission error recovery algorithm. Furthermore, the