Sensor Cooperation Based on Network Coding in Wireless Body Area Networks

In a typical monitoring system, physiological parameters such as Electrocardiography (ECG), Electromyography (EMG), and Electroencephalography (EEG) from various sensors placed strategically on human body are monitored for providing real-time feedback to the patient and medical staffs. For traditional point-to-point WBAN communication systems, sensors data are sent directly to the central sensor. In the direct transmission, those sensors´ signals are affected by fading because of reflection, diffraction, energy absorption, shadowing by body, body movement, clothes and the surrounding environment. To combat fading effect effectively, this paper attempts to introduce energy efficient network coding into novel MIMO-based multi sensor cooperation. In this paper, we investigate the performance in terms of system outage probability of proposed technique in comparisons to direct transmission, traditional cooperation and network coding-based sensor cooperation. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the analysis and demonstrate that cooperative communication scheme based on network coding in WBAN channel provides superior performance compared to other two schemes.