P-rake receivers in different measured WBAN hospital channels

In wireless applications, power consumption has been, and will be, one of the important characteristics when designing any wireless device. This is the case especially in sensor networks where a single sensor may be functioning, hopefully for very long time, without external power source. Generally, the architecture complexity reduces the battery life, but the performance increases with complexity. The best performance is achieved with the most complex devices which, however, consume a lot of power. Rake receivers can offer a good tradeoff between complexity and performance. In the near future, due to the aging of population, personal medical applications are most likely increasing in number and gaining more attention in industry. This paper presents simulation results for IEEE 802.15.4a ultra wideband (UWB) rake receivers in measured hospital channel. Oulu University Hospital in Oulu, Finland, was the location of the wireless body area network (WBAN) channel model measurements.