Performance Analysis of Optical-CDMA for Uplink Transmission in Medical Extra-WBANs

Abstract

This paper considers the use of infrared wireless communications for uplink transmission in extra wireless body-area networks. We focus on a multi-user medical application, where the collected medical data of several patients inside a hospital room is transmitted to one or several access points (APs). For this uplink transmission, we investigate the performance of optical code-division multiple access in asynchronous mode, while taking into account the effect of random transmitter orientation. For this purpose and to consider realistic scenarios, we implement an orientation-based random waypoint mobility model to consider the mobility of patients inside a hospital ward. Performance evaluation is done in terms of the link average bit-error-rate and outage probability. We further investigate the performance improvement by using several APs, compared with the case of a single AP.

Keywords

• Wireless body area networks
• medical WBAN
• telemedicine
• wireless optical communications
• infrared data transmission
• optical code-division multiple access