BER performance and data throughput of body sensor networks for reliable biological signal transmission over the human body

According to the IEEE 802.15 task group 6, human body communication (HBC) is a wireless body area network (WBAN) that operates at frequency band 5–50 MHz. In particular, communication between nodes is through body surface to body surface, and the human body acts as the transmission channel. This paper designs the link budget signaling parameters required for reliable transmission of biological signals over the IEEE 802.15.6a HBC channel model, and investigates the bit-error-rate (BER) and data throughput performances of different modulation schemes. These modulation schemes include non-coherent binary frequency shift keying (NcBFSK) with non-coherent detection, in addition to the commonly used schemes for HBC communications, namely coherent binary phase shift keying (CBPSK), coherent binary frequency shift keying (CBFSK), and on-off keying (OOK). According to the numerical results based on theoretical analysis, experimental results, as well as Monte-Carlo simulations, NcBFSK with non-coherent detection and bandwidth-integration window product BT=30$ BT = 30 $, CBPSK, CBFSK, and OOK, represent appropriate solutions for the reliable transmission of biological signals over HBC-based WBANs. The results are based on BER=1e-10$ \text{ BER} = 1\text{ e}-10 $ and 1 Mbps data rate for low data rate applications, and BER=1e-3$ \text{ BER} = 1\text{ e}-3 $ and data rate = 10 Mbps for high data rate applications.