AID: An Energy Efficient Decoding Scheme for LDPC Codes in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

One of the major challenges in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is to prolong the lifetime of network. Traditional research work focuses on minimizing transmit power; however, in the case of short range communication the consumption power in decoding is significantly larger than transmit power. This paper investigates the minimization of total power consumption by reducing the decoding power consumption. For achieving a desired Bit Error Rate (BER), we introduce some fundamental results on the basis of iterative message-passing algorithms for Low Density Parity Check Code (LDPC). To reduce energy dissipation in decoder, LDPC based coded communications between sensors are considered. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of LDPC at different code rates and introduce Adaptive Iterative Decoding (AID) by exploiting threshold on the number of iterations for a certain BER (10−4). In iterative LDPC decoding, the total energy consumption of network is reduced by 20 − 25%. c © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.