Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 2, number 4, 2009 // View article
Authors:
Richard Mc Sweeney
Christian Spagnol
Emanuel Popovici
Luigi Giancardi
Keywords: Medical application; power reduction; WBAN; Huffman source coding; Reed-Solomon channel coding
Abstract:
This paper examines the system level energy performance of Wireless Sensor Motes for Electroencephalography (EEG) patient monitoring application by the use of concatenated source and channel coding. The addition of coding in a power constraint system has its advantages by reducing the energy per bit, but it also has its drawback in the cost of the power consumption in the encoding and decoding processes. In this work Huffman code is implemented as the source coding, and a shortened Reed-Solomon code is used for channel coding. The reliability and energy savings of the scheme is presented and the impact of the coding procedure on the communications performance is analyzed. The results show that it is possible to have Bit Error Rate (BER) and compression gains in the system, and that the computational time of purely software oriented implementations are not optimal. Also, the possibility for future extensions of this coding scheme, which would introduce better efficiency and accuracy, are shown. The error patterns that occur in the channel are investigated, and a design space for a possible Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) scheme that would minimize the power consumption of this implementation is proposed.
Pages: 337 to 348
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.
Publication date: March 17, 2010
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2628