Performance evaluation of wireless optical communication for mobile body area network scenario with blocking effects

Abstract

International audienceUsing wireless optical communication (WOC) to establish on-body links constitutes a promising solution to address radiofrequency interference issues in body area network (BAN) especially concerning medical applications. Actually, this permits decreasing electromagnetic perturbations in the patient body environment. To evaluate WOC performance for BAN scenario, the authors investigate on-body communication between a BAN node and the central unit placed on the patient which is supposed to be moving in a room. Considering a diffuse optical transmission scheme based on optical reflections over the environment, the authors propose an adapted, fast and simple method to determine the performance taking into account the presence of obstacles in the room. Thanks to this method, the authors evaluate the WOC outage probability assuming uniform node mobility on the patient body and patient mobility in the environment. The results permit discussing the WOC robustness according to the optical reflection properties of the blocking elements and show the WOC potentialities for mobile medical BAN scenario

A Heuristic Approach for Optical Transceiver Placement to Optimize SNR and Illuminance Uniformities of an Optical Body Area Network

“…In [ 23 ], white-light LEDs were used to successfully transmit biomedical data and healthcare information. In [ 6 ], the blocking effects were considered to showcase their impact on OBAN communication. While all of these studies focused on a single-user environment, Refs.…”

“…Accordingly, it is imperative that the data collected by the coordinator from the SNs at tier-II must be transmitted/ received reliably to/from the AP and vice versa to avoid any mishaps. While reliability in OBANs depends on several factors, such as blocking effects [6], ambient light interference [8], and mobility [9], broadly, it primarily relies on the received SNR levels at the photodetector (PD) which in turn determine the system performance. For a typical OBAN employing IM/DD with OOK-NRZ modulation format, the required theoretical SNR is 15.6 dB to maintain a minimum (threshold) BER of 10 −9 [6,10].…”

“…Even though the two-way data transmission and reception in OBANs are critical at all the three tiers of communication, UL and DL connections at tier-II are of utmost importance because they not only carry patients’ sensitive information, but also establish a link between tier- I and tier- III. Furthermore, the QoS of the bi-directional UL and DL wireless transmissions encompasses robustness and reliability with the bit error rate (BER) expected to be or less [ 4 , 6 , 7 ], for instance, in applications like ECG, EEG, drug delivery, and glucose level monitoring [ 7 ]. Thus, any negligence at this level could be life-threatening and, so, QoS remains a fundamental design issue at tier-II.…”

“…While reliability in OBANs depends on several factors, such as blocking effects [ 6 ], ambient light interference [ 8 ], and mobility [ 9 ], broadly, it primarily relies on the received levels at the photodetector (PD) which in turn determine the system performance. For a typical OBAN employing IM/DD with OOK-NRZ modulation format, the required theoretical is 15.6 dB to maintain a minimum (threshold) BER of [ 6 , 10 ]. This implies that a minimum of 15.6 dB must be made available throughout the room to ensure desired communication performance for OBANs.…”

Critical Data Delivery Using TOPSIS in Wireless Body Area Networks

“…A stochastic link cost formulation is developed in [13]. Ludoric et al [14] proposed a performance evaluation scheme for BAN with blocking effects using one bounce model for their evaluation.…”