High-speed adaptive wireless body area networks

Adaptive ultra-wideband wireless body area network (WBAN) is proposed in this paper as a feasible mobile health platform, offering a high-speed and robust service. It employs a space-time-frequency-coded (STFC) multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing ultra-wideband technology. It is designed to improve the average bit error performance for high data rate applications while maintaining a reasonably high throughput in body-to-external links of a WBAN. The proposed adaptive WBAN comprises two novel components, namely, the frame transmission model and the bit error rate (BER) estimation-based adaptive algorithm. In addition, the optimization of adaptive parameters is conducted to obtain an extra improvement, hence enhancing the performance further. Simulation results show that the proposed optimized adaptive system achieves up to a 2-dB gain over the adaptive WBAN, thus providing up to a 6-dB gain over the non-adaptive WBAN system. This improvement is equivalent to a reduction of the power consumption by up to 37% compared to the non-optimized adaptive WBAN and up to 75% compared to the non-adaptive WBAN system, thus extending the battery life and enhancing the reliability of WBAN services significantly.