Coded pulse position modulation communication system over the human abdominal channel for medical wireless body area networks

This paper presents a power-saving communication system for the link from an in-body sensor to an on-body sensor over the abdominal channel in medical wireless body area networks. The idea of the work is to exploit the time diversity of the channel coding and the high dimensional signal constellation of M-ary pulse position modulation (M-PPM) to improve the system performance. In addition to the illustration of the significant performance improvement of the proposed communication system, the severe fading effect of the abdominal channel compared with the conventional Rayleigh channel is investigated through the theoretical capacity and bit error rate (BER) performance.