ETD

• FEC
• ldpc
• power
• reed-solomon
• RF
• turbo-code
• viterbi
• wsn

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are very attractive for many researchers nowadays. This document aims to investigate trade-offs in the use of FEC (Forward Error Correction) for these new systems. Firstly, literature investigations have been carried out into the state of the art RF transceivers and decoders. Measurements have been performed to compute the power requirements of the LDPC decoder. The next step was defining figures of merit such as Global Coding Gain and Critical Distance, or Critical Energy, to fairly compare different solutions. Finally, technology scaling applied to the performed analysis exploits trends for WSN in the future technology generations. Results show several trade-offs and enable good choices to be made about the more appropriate coding scheme to use in a WSN, depending of the scenario.