An Ultrasonic Power Splitting Receiver With Improved Complexity-Reliability Trade-Off for Intra-Body Communications

Data transmission that is reliable and relies on low-complexity transceiver techniques is of practical importance for ultrasonic intra-body communications (IBCs). Considering the trade-off between reliability and computational complexity, this paper proposes an ultrasonic dynamic power splitting (UDPS) scheme. UDPS consists of statistic power splitting (SPS) and time switching (TS), where SPS splits the received signal to coherent detection (CD) and energy detection (ED) with an adjustable power splitting ratio, and TS switches between CD and ED with an adjustable power coefficient. Therefore, the proposed UDPS can exploit the reliability of CD and meanwhile benefit from the low complexity of ED. We also derive the theoretical bit-error rate (BER) of UDPS. Both theoretical and simulated results demonstrate that due to the linear noise in CD and non-linear noise in ED, the optimal power splitting ratio of SPS is 1 and the optimal power coefficient of TS is within (0, 1). More importantly, UDPS can achieve much lower complexity than CD at the cost of a slight BER loss for IBCs.