Performance evaluation of reliable communications for wireless in-body sensor networks

Wireless in-body sensor networks are attracting increasing attention for numerous healthcare applications and medical services. Implant devices are widely employed to measure physiological signals inside the human body in a simple, long lifetime and continuous approach. However, due to the strict technical requirements of implant devices, there exist numerous key research challenges in this area. Considering realistic transmission power requirements based on the IEEE 802.15.6 standard safety regulations, the channel characteristics of implant to deep implant and implant to body surface communication scenarios are investigated. Furthermore, multiple vital quality of service (QoS) factors of implant communication channels are studied regarding channel capacity, bit error rate (BER), link quality and data rate. The system performance evaluation indicates that the data transmission rate can be optimized up to 10 Mbps. Furthermore, the transmission distance supported by in-body to on-body communication path is 2 meters, at 1 µW while the in-body to deep tissue region communication channel achieves less than 1 meter. The results proposed in this paper give an outlook of the intra-body networking system performance and can be applied to in-body communication system implementation research.