Temporal diversity coding for improving the performance of wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) promise a significant improvement in the reliability of monitoring and treating people’s health. A WBAN comprises a number of intelligent biosensors and actuators that may either be implanted in vivo or mounted on the surface of the human body, and that are capable of wireless communication to one or more external nodes that are in close proximity to the human body. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient feedforward error-control technology, Temporal Diversity Coding (TDC), to increase the robustness and reliability of Wireless Body Area networks. Temporal Diversity Coding applies Diversity Coding in time and space to improve the WBAN’s performance. We demonstrate that by implementing this novel technique, we can achieve significant improvement (∼ 50%) in throughput compared to extant WBANs.