Research on Payload Aggregation of Packets in WSNs
Ákos Milánkovich, Gergely Ill, Károly Lendvai, Sándor Imre, Sándor Szabó · 2015
Creating wireless sensor networks requires a different approach than traditional communication networks because energy efficiency plays a key role in sensor networks, which consist of devices without external power. The amount of energy used determines the lifetime of these devices. In most cases data packets are less sensitive to delay, thus can be aggregated, making it possible to gather more useful information reducing the energy required to transmit information. This article discusses the energy efficiency of different Forward Error Correction algorithms and presents a method to calculate the optimal amount of aggregation of the data packets in terms of power consumption, while taking into account the Bit Error Rate characteristics of the wireless channel. The contribution of this paper is a general method to improve the energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks by using the optimal amount of aggregation in case of different FEC codes and channel characteristics. The presented results can be applied to any packet-based wireless protocol.