Title: Power-efficient cooperative coding with hybrid-ARQ soft combining for wireless sensor networks in block-fading environment

Authors: Hieu T. Nguyen, Ha H. Nguyen, Tho Le-Ngoc

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract: This paper proposes a combined cooperative coding and hybrid-ARQ scheme suitable for power-efficient transmission in wireless sensor networks. By exploiting cooperative coding in multiple-node wireless sensor networks to provide spatial diversity in addition to time diversity offered by Automatic Retransmission Request (ARQ), the proposed scheme can support high-performance transmission at low power consumption. Analytical derivations of both the throughput and bit error probability of the proposed transmission scheme, using a tree representation, are obtained. Simulation and analytical results are in good agreement and show that the proposed scheme can offer a significant saving in the transmitted power for a target link performance while maintaining the same throughput as compared to the traditional non cooperative hybrid-ARQ scheme. In particular, the power saving increases at higher link performance requirements.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSN; coded modulation; error control coding; cooperative communications; collaborative signal processing; automatic retransmission request; ARQ; wireless networks; block fading; cooperative coding.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2008.019247

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2008 Vol.4 No.1/2, pp.3 - 12

Published online: 04 Jul 2008 *

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