An Energy Efficient Decoding Scheme for Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-efficient decoding scheme for Wireless Body Area Networks by optimizing LDPC decoding processes, significantly reducing total network power consumption while maintaining reliable communication.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptive iterative decoding method for LDPC codes that reduces energy use in sensor communications within WBANs.

Findings

Total energy consumption reduced by 20-25%

Adaptive decoding improves energy efficiency at target BER

LDPC performance evaluated at different code rates

Abstract

One of the major challenges in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is to prolong the lifetime of network. Traditional research work focuses on minimizing transmit power; however, in the case of short range communication the consumption power in decoding is significantly larger than transmit power. This paper investigates the minimization of total power consumption by reducing the decoding power consumption. For achieving a desired Bit Error Rate (BER), we introduce some fundamental results on the basis of iterative message-passing algorithms for Low Density Parity Check Code (LDPC). To reduce energy dissipation in decoder, LDPC based coded communications between sensors are considered. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of LDPC at different code rates and introduce Adaptive Iterative Decoding (AID) by exploiting threshold on the number of iterations for a certain BER (0.0004). In iterative LDPC decoding, the total energy consumption of network is reduced by 20 to 25%.