Stochastic Computing based BCH Decoder for WBAN Systems

BCH codes have been accepted as the error correction coding scheme by the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for wireless body area networks (WBAN). Soft-decision BCH decoders are attractive for the reason that the decoding gains result in significant transmitting energy reduction. An approximate computing technology called stochastic computing is a promising low power and low hardware cost implementation candidate for BCH soft decision decoders. In this paper, a stochastic computing based soft decision decoder is presented for the BCH code defined in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. According to the evaluation results, the proposed design has the advantages of energy consumption and hardware cost while approaching the decoding performance in terms of block error rate (BLER) compared to existing BCH soft decision decoders. In addition, the proposed design requires no noise power estimation for the soft decision demodulation module, which could further reduce the hardware cost and energy consumption of the WBAN receiver.