An energy-efficient clustered distributed coding for large-scale wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) usually consists of a large number of battery-powered low-cost sensors with limited data collection and processing capacity. In order to prolong the lifetime of the WSN with a target error performance, a novel clustered distributed coding framework, referred to as distributed multiple-sensor cooperative turbo coding (DMSCTC), is developed for a large-scale WSN with sensor grouped in cooperative cluster. In the proposed DMSCTC scheme, a simple forward error correction is employed at each sensor and a simple multi-sensor joint coding is adopted at the cluster head, while complicated joint iterative decoding is implemented only at the data collector. The proposed DMSCTC scheme achieves extra distributed coding gain and cooperative spatial diversity without introducing extra complexity burden on the sensors by transferring the complicated joint decoding process to the data collector. With the proposed scheme, the WSN can achieve the target error performance with less power consumption, thus prolonging its lifetime. The error performance and energy efficiency of the proposed DMSCTC scheme are analyzed, and followed by Monte Carlo simulations. Both analytical and simulation results show that the DMSCTC can substantially improve the energy efficiency of the clustered WSN.