Effect of energy detection duration on UWB-IR transmission performance in wireless body area networks

One of promising transmission technologies in wireless body area networks (BANs) is ultra wideband-impulse radio (UWB-IR) transmission, which can provide high data rate for real-time transmission, and extremely low power consumption for increasing device longevity. Moreover, energy detection scheme in UWB-IR transmission is advantageous in terms of simple implementation. On the other hand, UWB-IR signals suffer from large attenuation in wireless BANs, so it is important to secure high quality of UWB-IR transmission performance. In this paper, we pay attention to optimization for energy detection duration of the UWR-IR transmission to solve this problem. For this purpose, in addition to an experiment and a computer simulation, we derive the bit error rate (BER) performance by a theoretical analysis with Gaussian approximation. From the investigations, we have come to a conclusion that nevertheless several conditions are required, the theoretical analysis with Gaussian approximation can work well, that is, we achieve good agreements between the results by the experiment, the computer simulation and the theory. Furthermore, the UWB-IR transmission performance can be improved by using an optimal energy detection duration.