Cooperative body-area-communications: First and second-order statistics with decode-and-forward

Characterization of cooperative communications, for the `everyday' body-area-network (BAN) wireless channel is presented. Performance analysis is given based on many hours of empirical data measured on five adult subjects. A decode-and-forward protocol is chosen for the cooperative BAN. Three typical locations for on-body relays/hubs are considered, along with seven typical on-body sensor locations. Large improvements over single-link communications, in terms of outage probability and average fade duration, are demonstrated with the use of one and two on-body relays. Coherent selection combining (SC) and coherent maximum-ratio combining (MRC) are used in the analysis, with MRC only providing a marginal improvement over SC. The advantages of careful relay placement are also demonstrated.