Transdermal subcarrier L-PSK or DBPSK optical wireless links with time diversity, skin attenuation and spatial jitter

Abstract

Recent advances in both optical wireless communication systems and implantable medical devices have paved the way for the establishment of high-speed transdermal optical wireless (TOW) communication links for telemetry with medical implants. However, the performance of such wireless links is primary degraded by skin-induced attenuation effect along with spatial jitter. In order to deal with these limitations, in this work, we propose, for the first time in the TOW communication field, the subcarrier intensity modulation technique. On top of that, the stochastic nature of pointing errors which little has been reported in the open TOW technical literature, is considered. Under these circumstances, an average symbol error propability (ASEP) analysis for typical subcarrier L-PSK or DBPSK TOW link configurations with time diversity technique is performed. In this context, novel analytical ASEP expressions are derived, while appropriate analytical results are depicted and validated by Monte Carlo simulations over a wide signal-to-noise ratio range.