System development and performance evaluation on detection schemes for UWB-IR implant communications

Ultra wideband-impulse radio (UWB-IR) transmission is one of promising transmission technologies in implant body area networks (BANs). Although some studies have investigated the channel model and communication architecture in implant BANs, no study quantitatively shows the feasibility of UWB-IR communication in the human body with actual developed transceivers at a high data rate. In this paper, we focus on experimental evaluation of the correlation detection (coherent detection) and the energy detection (non-coherent detection) for UWB-IR transmission with multi-pulse position modulation (MPPM). For this purpose, we develop a UWB-IR communication system with MPPM scheme, and experimentally evaluate the transmission performance of the developed systems with the two different detection schemes. In addition to the experimental evaluation, we also theoretically analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance by using Gaussian approximation. From the experimental results, the developed system has achieved a BER of 10^-2 at the propagation loss of 75 dB with a data rate of 2Mbps in the correlation detection. This result shows the feasibility of reliable UWB-IR communication in actual implant BANs.