We investigate the effect of channel coding on throughput and energy consumption in uncoordinated distributed (and) wireless networks, e.g. sensor networks. Although the redundancy associated with channel coding causes additional interference in this type of networks, we show that coding can decrease the frame error rate and increase the throughput. Furthermore, we introduce a new measure, which we call the energy based system efficiency. It relates the average throughput to the required transmission energy and allows prediction of the performance of certain coding schemes.

The tangential sphere bound (TSB) of Poltyrev (1994) is a tight upper bound on the word error probability P/sub w/ of linear codes with maximum likelihood decoding and is based on the code's distance spectrum. An extension of the TSB to a bound on the bit-error probability P/sub b/ is given by Sason/Shitz (see IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol.46, p.24-47, 2000). We improve the tangential sphere bound on P/sub b/ and apply the new method to some examples. Our comparison to other bounds as well as to simulation results shows an improved tightness, particularly for signal-to-noise ratios below the value corresponding to the computational cutoff rate R/sub o/.