Reed Solomon Erasure Coding for the Optimization of Network Reliability and Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

his Network error correction (NEC) helps to correct errors of a communication network by using the concept of network coding [1] and provides an alternative to the traditional link-by-link error correction. NEC is widely used in sensor networks and in video network broadcasting, where the network suffers from delay and energy constraints. This paper aims to design an Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ)based RS-erasure code to correct the errors/ erasures encountered in the data packets due to the random errors and unreliable network links. The proposed protocol tries to combine the RS-Erasure code and Selective Repeat (SR based) retransmission scheme to achieve the higher network reliability and energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks. In this scheme the code rate of a given message block is calculated dynamically depending upon the error rate of the link to minimize the total transmission efforts. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with some existing techniques like SR-ARQ, SRTP [11] and CRBT [24] on the basis of Total transmissions required for end to end reliable data delivery, energy consumption by the network nodes, transmission delay and the network-throughput. Keywords— Include Network Coding, Network Error Correction, ARQ efficiency, Reliability, Erasure code, Reed Solomon Code