Power-Aware Wireless Communication System Design for Body Area Networks

Lili Wang, Ni An, Ali Hassan Sodhro, Dengyu Qiao, Yu Zhou, Ye Li

Shenzhen Institutes of the Advanced Technologies, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.

DOI: 10.4236/etsn.2013.22004                

Abstract

With the explosive development of wireless communication and low power embedded techniques, Body Area Network (BAN) has opened up new frontiers in the race to provide real-time health monitoring. IEEE 802 has established a Task Group called IEEE 802.15.6 inNovember 2007 and aims to establish a communication standard optimized for low power, high reliability applied to medical and non-medical application for BANs. This paper overviews the path loss model and the communication scheme for implant-to-body surface channel presented by IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Comparing with the standard scheme where BCH (Bose-Chaudhuri-Hochquenghem) code is employing, we propose a new coding solution using convolutional code operating with Bit Interleaver based on the properties of implant-to-body surface channel. To analyze the performance of the two Error Correct Coding (ECC) schemes, we performed simulations in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and power consumption on MATLAB and FPGA platform, respectively. The simulation results proved that with appropriate constraint length, convolutional code has a better performance not only in BER, but also in minimization of resources and power consumption.

Keywords

Power-Aware; Body Area Network; Path Loss Model; BCH; Convolutional Code; BER

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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