The challenge for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is to minimize the energy consumption while maintaining user constraints. In this paper, turbo-like (TL) codes with two simplified serial message passing algorithms are proposed for star-WSN. The two algorithms are implemented based on variable node updating. One is the modified sum-product algorithm (MSPA) and the other is the simplified feedback belief propagation algorithm (S-FBPA). The MSPA maintains the performance of the conventional serial sum-product algorithm (SPA), and S-FBPA has the same performance as conventional feed back belief propagation algorithm (FBPA), while both of proposed algorithms have significant complexity reduction.