Temporal diversity coding for improving the performance of wireless body area networks
Gabriel E. Arrobo, Zygmunt J. Haas, Richard D. Gitlin · 2012
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) promise a signifi-cant improvement in the reliability of monitoring and treat-ing people’s health. A WBAN comprises a number of in-telligent biosensors and actuators that may either be im-planted in vivo or mounted on the surface of the human body, and that are capable of wireless communication to one or more external nodes that are in close proximity to the human body. In this paper, we propose a new and effi-cient feedforward error-control technology, Temporal Diver-sity Coding (TDC), to increase the robustness and reliability of Wireless Body Area networks. Temporal Diversity Cod-ing applies Diversity Coding in time and space to improve the WBAN’s performance. We demonstrate that by im-plementing this novel technique, we can achieve significant improvement ( ∼ 50%) in throughput compared to extant WBANs.