Hybrid ARQ Error-Controlling Scheme for Robust and Efficient Transmission of UWB Body Area Networks

This paper presents hybrid type-II automatic repeat request (H-ARQ) for wireless wearable body area networks (BANs) based on ultra wideband (UWB) technology. The proposed model is based on three schemes, namely, high rate optimized rate compatible punctured convolutional codes (HRO-RCPC), Reed Solomon (RS) invertible codes and their concatenation. Forward error correction (FEC) coding is combined with simple cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error detection. The performance is investigated for two channels: CM3 (on-body to on-body) and CM4 (on-body to a gateway) scenarios of the IEEE802.15.6 BAN channel models for BANs. It is shown that the improvement in performance in terms of throughput and error protection robustness is very significant. Thus, the proposed H-ARQ schemes can be employed and optimized to suit medical and non-medical applications. In particular we propose the use of FEC coding for non-medical applications as those require less stringent quality of service (QoS), while the incremental redundancy and ARQ configuration is utilized only for medical applications. Thus, higher QoS is guaranteed for medical application of BANs while allowing coexistence with non-medical applications.