Channel modeling and BER performance of an implant UWB body area link

The objective of this study is to investigate the feasibility of an ultra wideband (UWB) impulse radio system for in-body to out-of-body wireless communication for biomedical applications. At first, a UWB antenna is designed in the UWB low band for implant use in the chest. Then the channel model is extracted and established based on finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulation with an anatomical human body model. The established channel model consists of a small set of parameters for generating discrete time impulse responses. The generated model shows good agreement with the FDTD-calculated result in terms of key communication metrics. For effective communication over the multipath-affected channel, the pulse position modulation is employed and a 2-finger RAKE structure with a constant temporal delay is proposed in the receiver. The bit error rate performance has shown the validity of the system in the in-body to out-of-body chest channel.