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 effciency due to the use of Cyclic-Pre-x (CP). In this paper, a new physical layer scheme for high-rate wireless body area networks based on MB-OFDM with O®set Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (OQAM) modulation is presented. The proposed MB-OFDM/OQAM can achieve high spectral and power effciency than conventional MB-OFDM system. Moreover, the use of the CP Interval in the conventional MBOFDM removes effciently the Inter-Symbols Interferences (ISI) but remains ine®ective towards the Inter-Carriers Interferences (ICI) caused by the channel frequency o®set (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.