On the Outage Capacity of Transdermal Optical Wireless Links with Stochastic Spatial Jitter and Skin-Induced Attenuation

Abstract

The tremendous development of both optical wireless communications (OWC) and implantable medical devices (IMDs) has recently enabled the establishment of transdermal optical wireless (TOW) links that utilize light waves to transfer information inside the living body to the outside world and conversely. Indeed, numerous emerging medical applications such as cortical recording and telemetry with cochlear implants require extremely high data rates along with low power consumption that only this new technology could accommodate. Thus, in this paper, a typical TOW link is investigated in terms of outage capacity which is a critical performance metric that has so far not been evaluated for such wireless systems in the open technical literature. More precisely, an outage capacity analysis is performed considering both skin-induced attenuation and stochastic spatial jitter, i.e., pointing error effects. Analytical expressions and results for the outage capacity are derived for a variety of skin channel conditions along with varying stochastic pointing errors which demonstrate the feasibility of this cross-field cooperation. Lastly, the corresponding simulation outcomes further validate our suggestions.

Keywords

• optical wireless communications (OWC)
• transdermal optical wireless (TOW) links
• implantable medical devices (IMDs)
• outage capacity
• pointing errors