Performance Assessment of IR-UWB Body Area Network (BAN) Based on IEEE 802.15.6 Standard

Abstract

Performance of impulse radio-based ultrawideband (IR-UWB) communications in wireless body area networks is investigated using the dedicated IEEE 802.15.6 standard. An IR-UWB transceiver system is implemented for both on-off keying and differential binary phase-shift keying modulations. Bit error rates are determined from measurements for different on-body links with different data rates. It is shown that using a 25-dB-gain low noise amplifier (LNA) at the receiver, reaching an uncoded bit error rate BER of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-3</sup> was not possible for some links operating at higher data rates. Power and energy consumption issues are then addressed, and results in terms of required pJ/bit to achieve a certain quality of communication are given and discussed.