Performance evaluation of virtual MIMO for UWB based body area networks

For impulse radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) based wireless body area network (WBAN) systems, one of the significant challenges is to guarantee a reliable link for data transmission. For this purpose, in this paper, we develop a simple but effective virtual MIMO (VMIMO) based cooperative diversity scheme for a single antenna transmitter being aided by an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper where performance of VMIMO is evaluated in IR-UWB based WBAN systems. The theoretical analysis reveals that VMIMO not only offers a full spatial diversity, but also can collect the multipath diversity contained in the dense WBAN channels. Preliminary simulation results show that VMIMO can provide a considerable improvement on bit error rate (BER) performance compared with the single-input single-output (SISO) WBAN systems.