Error Control Mechanism Based on Reed-Solomon Code for Wireless Networks

Abstract

The reliability of information transmission has a significant influence on network performance, so it has attracted extensive attention from researchers. Many error control mechanisms have been designed and proposed in order to improve the reliability of transmission. However, during transmission in wireless networks, high bit error rate and burst errors often occur, which poses great challenges in the design of error control mechanisms. The existing mechanisms suffer from a problem of either poor error correction ability or waste of network resources. The primary aim of this study is to develop an error control mechanism based on Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, which encodes packets using RS codes, and a re-encoding algorithm is designed for reducing the coded packet length. The proposed error control mechanism can not only reduce the number of redundant bits in the transmission process but also improve the error correction ability as much as possible when burst errors occur. Therefore, both the error correction ability and the network utility are considered in this work. The proposed mechanism was verified through theoretic analysis and by experiments using the NS2 simulator. The experimental results verified the error control ability and throughput performance of the proposed mechanism.