A Rate Adaptive of Error Control Coding in MAC Layer for UWB WBAN

This paper proposes the preliminary investigation of rate adaptive error correction coding applied to MAC layer of UWB Body Area Network (WBAN). As the reliability of system is very important in patient-critical monitoring, the issue can be improved by appending Error Correction Code (ECC) to communication message. However, such an effort can cause the packet overhead, latency, and more power consumption. To mitigate these disadvantages, the rate adaptive of ECC is proposed. The Reed-Solomon (RS) code designed in GF256 has been employed in this study. It fits well the maximum MAC length which is 255 bytes. In our investigation, several MIT-BIH Arrhythmia databases are chosen as input data to represent the patient monitoring. Considering the physical layer of WBAN standard, Ultra Wideband offers an advantage in term of bandwidth availability. Fading channel is employed to examine code's performance. The code rate and capability of error correction performance is measured in both Bit Error Rate (BER) and Block Error Rate (BLER).