Channel modelling and performance evaluation of UWB-based wireless body area networks

Abstract

This paper provides channel models for wireless body area network (WBAN) in UWB frequency band, and also presents performance evaluation using the derived channel models. The channel model is given by a statistical model in which parameters are derived from actually measured channel transfer function in a hospital room environment. These models enable us to evaluate performance of UWB-based WBAN. In this paper, bit error ratio (BER) and packet error ratio (PER) are shown for UWB-based WBAN which employs a signalling scheme among OOK, BPPM, BPSK, and DPSK. The results show that both OOK and BPPM which generally uses a non-coherent receiver provide severe performance when the target PER is set to 10–2 under the packet size of 128 bytes. The other signalling schemes achieve the required performance from the viewpoint of such error ratio.