A Novel Error Correction Mechanism for Energy-Efficient Cyber-Physical Systems in Smart Building

Smart building is an effective solution to address the issue of energy consumption in today’s cyber-physical systems (CPSs) connected world. As an important tool to collect information from a fleet of electric appliance that installed in the building scope, a wireless sensor network is widely employed for this purpose. In this paper, we propose to incorporate forward error correction into the media access control layer of IEEE 802.15.4 standard for packets transmission, as the originally used automatic repeat request mechanism is a timing and energy consumed process that should be avoided in a noisy wireless channel of a smart building environment. Based on the developed CPS simulation platform, the bits error rate and packets error rate of convolutional codes (CCs), Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, and their concatenated codes are intensively investigated, on condition of been applied to different packet length and code rates. We show that the CCs are superior to other codes in most cases. However, the RS and CCs concatenated codes are good candidates, and the RS codes with larger symbol length are preferred for a longer packet. In this regard, future research will concentrated on non-line-of-sight wireless channel, and take the pulse interference from other devices into account.