Investigation of channel spatial diversity for dual-link cooperative communications in WBAN

Author

Liu, Lingfeng ; Bhatnagar, Vaibhav ; Robles, Cristina Garcia ; De Doncker, Philippe ; Vandendorpe, Luc ; Oestges, Claude

Author_Institution

ICTEAM, Univ. catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

fYear

2011

fDate

11-15 April 2011

Firstpage

2972

Lastpage

2976

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the spatial diversity gain offered by on-body channels in indoor environments. Narrowband on-body channel measurements are conducted in a dual-link topology, to cover various scenarios with different link geometries and body movements. Cooperative dual-link communications with equal-power allocation scheme are evaluated based on the channel measurements. The simulated bit-error-rate (BER) of the cooperative dual-link is compared with the single-link performance. The results highlight the performance of the cooperative scheme for uncorrelated channels with significant fading variance and close pathloss level. In such cases, spatial diversity effectively improves the quality and BER of on-body communications.

Keywords

body area networks; channel allocation; channel estimation; cooperative communication; diversity reception; error statistics; indoor radio; radio links; BER; WBAN; bit error rate; cooperative communications; dual-link topology; equal power allocation scheme; indoor environments; on-body channel measurements; spatial diversity; Antenna measurements; Biomedical measurements; Bit error rate; Diversity methods; Fading; Legged locomotion; Signal to noise ratio;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP), Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on

Conference_Location

Rome

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0250-1

Type

conf

Filename

5782202