Efficient coding schemes for low‐rate wireless personal area networks

Abstract

The emerging market of Internet of things has created great demand for low-cost, low-power wireless technologies. Existing IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed for low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs). However, current standard does not fully utilise the benefit of the code redundancy. In this study, the authors propose new coding schemes for LR-WPANs with improved coding gain. They first propose a block code based on extended Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) code that increases the minimum Hamming distance compared with the existing code used in LR-WPANs. The computational complexity of the encoder and decoder remains about the same. In addition, by applying the extended BCH code directly to LR-WPANs, the data rate of the system can be increased without sacrificing coding performance. They further propose a tail-biting convolutional (TBC) code with optimum generator polynomials for LR-WPANs. The proposed TBC code enjoys significant performance improvement while preserving the effective code rate as well as a low decoding complexity. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed coding schemes.