Highly Simplified and Bandwidth-Efficient Human Body Communications Based on IEEE 802.15.6 WBANs Standard

This paper presents a transmission method for improving human body communications in terms of spectral efficiency, and the performances of bit-error-rate (BER) and frame synchronization, with a highly simplified structure. Compared to the conventional frequency selective digital transmission supporting IEEE standard 802.15.6 for wireless body area networks, the proposed scheme improves the spectral efficiency from 0.25 bps/Hz to 1 bps/Hz based on the 3-dB bandwidth of the transmit spectral mask, and the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) by 0.51 dB at a BER of 10(-6) with an 87.5% reduction in the detection complexity of the length of the Hamming distance computation. The proposed preamble structure using its customized detection algorithm achieves perfect frame synchronization at the SNR of a BER of 10(-6) by applying the proposed pre-processing to compensate for the distortions on the preamble signals due to the band-limit effects by transmit and receive filters.