ACC-LDPC and ACC-RS/LDPC Schemes for Reliable and Energy-Efficient Multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network.

Sensor nodes are expected to remain autonomous for a long period of time and communication must be successfully maintained. Therefore, energy efficiency and communication reliability are the main challenges in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Clustering-based routing protocols are the main solution to energy constraints in this kind of network. Channel coding is required in a lossy milieu to guarantee reliable and efficient transmission. However, this reliability is compromised by the added energy of encoding and decoding in the network. In this context, to explore the trade-off between energy efficiency and reliability, we proposed two approaches: ACC-LDPC (Adaptive Coding Clustered protocol with LDPC decoding) and ACC-RS/LDPC (Adaptive Coding Clustered protocol with RS and LDPC decoding) for clustered multi-hop WSNs. The proposed approaches are based on intra and inter-cluster distances to enhance the transmission reliability, extend the network lifetime and minimize the energy consumption in the WSN. Simulation results show that ACC-RS/LDPC scheme enhances both energy consumption and transmission reliability compared to the ACC-LDPC scheme in clustered multi-hop WSNs. ACC-RS/LDPC improves the reliability of the uncoded system by 90%, while ACC-LDPC enhances it by 82%. Thus, the ACC-RS/LDPC outperforms the ACC-LDPC by increasing the network lifetime by 33%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]