NEW HIGH-RATE UWB SCHEME FOR WBAN-BASED HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS

Abstract

Given the emphasis on increasing wireless network usage for healthcare application, e.g., Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), the need for high-rate physical layer has become a genuine concern from research and industrial community. The use of the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is looking especially bright for such systems given its lower energy consumption and performances towards frequency-selective channels. However, the Multi-Band-OFDM-based UWB technique has some inherent limitations as loss in spectral e-ciency due to the use of Cyclic-Preflx (CP). In this paper, a new physical layer scheme for high-rate wireless body area networks based on MB-OFDM with Ofiset Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OQAM) modulation is presented. The proposed MB-OFDM/OQAM can achieve high spectral and power e-ciency than conventional MB-OFDM system. Moreover, the use of the CP Interval in the conventional MBOFDM removes e-ciently the Inter-Symbols Interferences (ISI) but remains inefiective towards the Inter-Carriers Interferences (ICI) caused by the channel frequency ofiset (FO). The performances evaluation of the proposed technique will be carried-out in realistic UWB-WBANs channels with various scenarios, which will be also presented and studied herein.