Low data-rate ultra-wideband impulse radio communications for wireless medical body area networks: highly-reliable noncoherent system design

In this paper we present receiver design considerations and performance analysis for the physical layer of low data-rate non-coherent Ultra--Wideband Impulse Radio (UWB--IR) communication systems. Such UWB--IR systems are of particular interest in wireless medical Body Area Networks (BAN); in medical BAN the amount of traffic is relatively low, however, reliability of communication under body-shadowing and interference conditions is of utmost importance. Two non-coherent modulation/detection schemes are treated analytically and numerically through noise and interference performance studies. Particular attention is given to the performance enhancement achieved by compression of the received signal by methods previously introduced by the authors.