Energy Consumption of Polar Codes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a strong force driving the evolution of mobile communications. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are important parts of IoT. Link reliability and power consumption are two critical design constraints in WSN designs. Error control coding (ECC) is a classic approach to increase link reliability and thus to lower the required transmitting power, however typically at the cost of an increased decoding complexity and power. The idea of this paper is to assess the potentials of applying polar codes to WSNs. For comparison, the well developed Turbo and LDPC codes are studied in terms of the error performance and the power consumption. The results in this paper show that when the ratio of the transmitting power over the decoding power is smaller than 2.5, applying polar codes is favorable in terms of the power consumption compared with Turbo and LDPC codes at the same BER performance. When this ratio is larger than 2.5, polar codes are almost the same as Turbo and LDPC codes in terms of the energy consumption.