Performance Analysis of Optical Intra-WBAN Links

We evaluate the performance of wireless body area networks (WBANs) in medical applications based on optical wireless transmission. We focus on the intra-WBAN links, where a set of medical sensors transmit the measured data to a coordinator node, placed on the patient's body. Based on a Monte Carlo ray-tracing approach and considering the effects of body shadowing and mobility, we propose statistical models for the channel DC gain based on kernel density estimation. Then, we investigate the outage probability performance of the different intra-WBAN links and discuss the impact of user mobility and node placement on the patient's body.