Performance of Ultra Wideband On-Body Communication Based on Statistical Channel Model

Qiong WANG
Jianqing WANG

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E93-B    No.4    pp.833-841
Publication Date: 2010/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E93.B.833
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Information and Communication Technology for Wellness and Medical Applications)
Category: 
Keyword: 
on-body communication,  ultra-wideband (UWB),  channel model,  bit error rate (BER),  

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Summary: 
Ultra wideband (UWB) on-body communication is attracting much attention in biomedical applications. In this paper, the performance of UWB on-body communication is investigated based on a statistically extracted on-body channel model, which provides detailed characteristics of the multi-path-affected channel with an emphasis on various body postures or body movement. The possible data rate, the possible communication distance, as well as the bit error rate (BER) performance are clarified via computer simulation. It is found that the conventional correlation receiver is incompetent in the multi-path-affected on-body channel, while the RAKE receiver outperforms the conventional correlation receiver at a cost of structure complexity. Different RAKE receiver structures are compared to show the improvement of the BER performance.