The effects of transmission power and modulation schemes on the performance of WBANs in on-body medical applications

Abstract

Wireless Body Area Networks support the operation within multiple frequency bands. Thus, they can be integrated in several applications, one of which is on-body medical monitoring applications, as concerned in this paper. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to present the impact of transmission power and both of Differential Binary Phase Shift Keying and Differential Quadrature Phase Shift Keying modulation schemes, on the performance of a WBAN model based on the IEEE 802.15.6 2.4 GHz narrow-band, dedicated to on-body medical applications. This involves identifying the modulation scheme(s) and transmission power level(s) to be adopted for these applications, that can be classified into three types depending on their data rate (low, medium and high data rate medical applications), in order to meet Packet Loss Rate and latency requirements. The numerical study has confirmed that the adoption of DBPSK modulation and low transmission powers provides good performance for low data rate monitoring applications. At medium data rates, a relatively increased transmit power was required. However, at high data rates, DQPSK modulation with a 0 dBm transmission power seemed to be the right choice to be made in terms of the mentioned performance indicators.