Joint VMIMO and LDPC decoders for IR-UWB wireless body area network

Abstract

A complete impulse radio-ultra wide band (IR-UWB) system is proposed to mitigate the impairments concerning on-body to off-body Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). The proposed system maintains the practical communication link between on-body sensors to the fusion center or the monitoring device held by the medical representative. Also, these sensors are assigned a recently proposed pulse shaping to mitigate the noise that existed in the IR-UWB WBAN channel. Furthermore, virtual multiple-input multiple-output (VMIMO) is proposed to perform spatial multiplexing between various sensors transmitted data. Moreover, low complex low density parity check (LDPC) encoding/decoding algorithms, including a new low complex hybrid LDPC decoding algorithm, are proposed to reduce the complexity and to enhance the bit error rate of the on-body sensors. Interestingly, low energy consumption at every sensor participating in the on-body to off-body WBAN was achieved by adopting the combination between LDPC decoders and VMIMO technique. According to simulation results, the new system enhanced the BER performance and reduced the complexity of the on-body to off-body IR-UWB communication system effectively.