An Enhanced Approach for Reliable Bulk Data Transmission Based on Erasure-Resilient Codes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

We suggest an enhanced approach for reliable bulk data transmission of image files, multimedia video files, and successive log files for monitoring systems over wireless sensor networks. Recently, some approaches have been proposed that use multiple blocks in a frame. These approaches simply drop the block that contains the error and the error-free blocks are transmitted to other nodes. This paper proposes an enhanced FEC scheme, called M-FEC, which reduces the overhead and the total number of transmissions. M-FEC fragments bulk data into many small blocks and these blocks are encoded using rateless codes. Only the erroneous blocks that are detected in a frame are dropped and a relay node waits for other incoming blocks in order to construct a full-sized frame. This simple approach can improve the performance of the FEC scheme over WSNs. Our experiments show that M-FEC reduces the number of received frames at the sink node by almost half compared to the previous approach. We compared our results for different degrees of Wi-Fi interference by choosing particular IEEE 802.15.4 channels and running our experiments for three different types of Wi-Fi interference.