Alamouti-cooperative Multiband-OFDM for High Data Rate Body-Centric Communications

Abstract

Growing interest in body-centric communications and healthcare services pushes the exploration of innovative solutions for an efficient communication system. Due to the restricted power of wearable devices, power consumption is a key issue for such applications. In this context, the ultra-wideband (UWB) system has been demonstrated to meet the power requirements. One of the efficient communication schemes which has been envisaged for body networks, is the cooperative relays which enhance the network coverage, with an optimal transceiver complexity. In this study, we propose a cooperative diversity scheme based space-time coding in order to provide an additional immunization against UWB channel fadings. Within this perspective, this paper compares the bit error rate (BER) performance of two new decode-and-forward (DF) protocol-based schemes. The result shows the viable performances of the proposed schemes regardless of the SNR range.