Reed-Solomon Codes for Low Power Communications

Power consumption is a critical issue for many applications running on autonomous battery operated devices. In the context of low power communications, the use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) schemes shall therefore not only be considered as a way to improve communication robustness but also as a way to reduce transmit power. The benefits of this approach can be assessed by analyzing the tradeoff between the additional performance gained and the power consumption overhead resulting from extra computations. In this paper, a selection method is described to size the parameters of a low power Reed-Solomon (RS) code. The rationale highlights the influence of code parameters on computational complexity and performance of the code. An efficient set of code parameters can be deduced from this analysis to reduce the global power consumption of the system. Among the RS codes considered, the shortened RS(40,32,4) code over GF(2) is selected for further implementation analysis. Several design improvements are investigated step by step, and the relative power savings achieved with each enhancement are quantified. These results tend to illustrate the improvements that can be reached with only little design efforts.