Cooperative communications for sleep monitoring in wireless body area networks

TL;DR

This paper evaluates cooperative receive diversity techniques in wireless body area networks for sleep monitoring, demonstrating significant improvements in reliability metrics through empirical measurements near 2.4 GHz.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical analysis of cooperative diversity in WBANs for sleep monitoring, showing performance gains with relay-based schemes.

Findings

Up to 7 dB signal improvement

20% reduction in outage duration

Enhanced reliability with cooperative schemes

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of cooperative receive diversity, for the wireless body area network (WBAN) radio channel, compliant with the IEEE 802.15.6 Standard, in the case of monitoring a sleeping person. Extensive WBAN measurements near the 2.4 GHz ISM band were used. Up to 7 dB and 20% improvement for two-hop communications with the use of relays are empirically demonstrated with respect to outage probability and outage duration, with 3-branch cooperative selection combining and 3-branch cooperative switch-and-examine combining.