Performance evaluation for cooperative diversity-based wireless body area network

This paper proposes cooperative diversity-based wireless body area network (WBAN) for healthcare service in order to mitigate the undesired effects of WBAN due to high path loss and fading as well as to keep a low transmit power while meeting to the desired WBAN quality of services, i.e., low outage probability and low bit error rate. In this paper, we consider all of the sensors which are placed on the human body, so CM3 B channel model is taken into account for computing the path loss of each WBAN link. Three well-known schemes for proactive relay selection have been addressed and applied in WBAN so as to compare the performance with the direct communication. The performance is evaluated in terms of outage probability (P_out) and bit error rate (BER). The simulation results confirm that P_out of cooperative diversity-based WBAN can be reduced higher 99.68% than that of direct communication at SNR of 0 dB and can be achieved below 4.5*10^-4 at the low SNR of 0 - 6 dB. Moreover, BER of cooperative diversity-based WBAN can also be significantly decreased higher 99.89% than that of direct communication at all SNRs of 0 - 10 dB.