Energy-Efficient and Low Complexity Channel Coding for Wireless Body Area Networks

A new design framework based on the modified protograph extrinsic information transfer (PEXIT) algorithm is proposed for wireless body area networks (WBAN) communication systems. Using the proposed framework, a protograph LDPC code of rate 1/2 is designed for the WBAN channel which is statistically modelled as Rician distribution with K-factor obtained from the path loss model. The proposed protograph LDPC coded system achieves a significant coding gain of 17.5 dB over the uncoded system. This coding gain is much higher than the coding gain (6.1 dB) of irregular LDPC coded system in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel reported previously for wireless sensor networks. This significant coding gain together with the low complexity encoder/decoder makes the protograph LDPC code an excellent candidate for WBAN communication systems where energy and complexity are among very demanding technical requirements.