Prototype ultra wideband-based wireless body area network--consideration of CAP and CFP slot allocation during human walking motion.

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of communication during human walking motion, using the medium access control (MAC) evaluation system for a prototype ultra-wideband (UWB) based wireless body area network for suitable MAC parameter settings for data transmission. Its physical layer and MAC specifications are based on the draft standard in IEEE802.15.6. This paper studies the effects of the number of retransmissions and the number of commands of GTS (guaranteed time slot) request packets in the CAP (contention access period) during human walking motion by varying the number of sensor nodes or the number of CFP (contention free period) slots in the superframe. The experiments were performed in an anechoic chamber. The number of packets received is decreased by packet loss caused by human walking motion in the case where 2 slots are set for CFP, regardless of the number of nodes, and this materially decreases the total number of packets received. The number of retransmissions and the GTS request commands increase according to increases in the number of nodes, largely reflecting the effects of the number of CFP slots in the case where 4 nodes are attached. In the cases where 2 or 3 nodes are attached and 4 slots are set for CFP, the packet transmission rate is more than 95%. In the case where 4 nodes are attached and 6 slots are set for CFP, the packet transmission rate is reduced to 88% at best.

Performance evaluation of wearable wireless body area networks during walking motions in 444.5 MHz and 2450 MHz.

This paper gives performance evaluation of wearable wireless body area networks (WBANs) during walking motion. In order to evaluate the performance, received signal strength (RSS), packet error rate (PER), and bit error rate (BER) are measured in an anechoic chamber and an office room. This measurement is conducted in the frequency band of 444.5 and 2450 MHz by using GFSK signal with symbol rate of 1 MHz. The results show that in the anechoic chamber the WBAN using the 444.5 MHz enables to provide error-free communication, on the other hand, the WBAN operated in the 2450 MHz faces packet errors. Measurement results in the office room give comparable performance between these frequencies. From these observations, the use of 2450 MHz for wearable WBANs needs reflection waves in order to compensate a shadowing effect caused by the human body using the WBAN.

Novel joint source-channel coding for wireless transmission of radiography images.

A wireless technology is required to realize robust transmission of medical images like a radiography image over noisy environment. The use of error correction technique is essential for realizing such a reliable communication, in which a suitable channel coding is introduced to correct erroneous bits caused by passing through a noisy channel. However, the use of a channel code decreases its efficiency because redundancy bits are also transmitted with information bits. This paper presents a joint source-channel coding which maintains the channel efficiency during transmission of medical images like a radiography image. As medical images under the test, we use typical radiography images in this paper. The joint coding technique enjoys correlations between pixels of the radiography image. The results show that the proposed joint coding provides capability to correcting erroneous bits without increasing the redundancy of the codeword.

A reliable wireless monitoring of periodic vital signals using a novel joint source-channel coding.

This paper proposes a joint source-channel coding technology to transmit periodic vital information such as an electrocardiogram (ECG). It shows the iterative decoding method using a correlation value which can be obtained from ECG periodicity as Side-Information. The improvement is shown when bit strings are transmitted with different encoding rates. Because the proposed method has an error correcting system and makes a code processing decrease, some miniaturization and energy-saving can be expected of the equipment. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by comparisons with Differential Pulse Code Modulation, which is a typical compression method of ECG, and with the no coding method.