On the Use of Low-density Parity Check Code for Capacity and Bit Error Rate Sensitive Wireless Sensor Network at Nakagami-n Channel

Abstract

Energy efficient transmission with fairly high capacity is an attractive feature for energy constraint wireless sensor network (WSN). This opens a door for the outage analysis keeping the energy efficient performance active. We propose to employ low-density parity check (LDPC) codes to provide reliable communication while saving power in the sensor networks. We derive the ergodic and outage capacity for a cluster head to DGN transmission through a Nakagami-n channel in a WSN. We also explore the bit error rate (BER) analysis for the same channel for an LDPC coded transmission. We compared the ergodic and outage capacity over average SNR for different Nakagami channel parameter. We see that the ergodic as well as outage capacity increases as both SNR and Nakagami-n channel parameters increase. We also compare the outage capacity for different probability of outage. Nakagami-n channel simulations are also compared with AWGN channel simulations. Simulation results show that with the proper choice of LDPC decoding, capacity achieving low power transmission is possible in WSN.