Impact of error control code on characteristic distance in wireless underground sensor networks

Wireless underground sensor network (WUSN) is a promising application area. However, the challenges in designing an energy efficient and reliable WUSN are different from the terrestrial wireless sensor network (WSN). The main reason for this is the medium of propagation which is soil in case of WUSN instead of air. Characteristic distance is an important parameter for designing an energy efficient network where nodes are energy constrained. Impact of error control code (ECC) on characteristic distance in WUSN is discussed considering both electromagnetic (EM) wave and magnetic induction (MI) as the propagating signal. From the simulation results, it is evident that the values of characteristic distance in WUSN are significantly lower in comparison to the terrestrial WSN. The results also show that MI‐based system has longer characteristic distance than an EM wave‐based system. Similar to terrestrial WSN, the characteristic distance in WUSN can be increased with the use of suitable ECC if decoding is performed at all the intermediate nodes.