Performance of Wireless Body Area Network in the presence of multipath and fading

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a wireless network designed with sensors in, on, or around the human body for the purpose of monitoring the physiological parameters of the body. Since the signal is transmitted in a wireless environment, it is expected that the signal will be affected by noise, interference and multipath fading. To successfully design and deploy such a wireless system, it is necessary to accurately estimate the signal parameters and their propagation behavior through the wireless channel. This paper investigates the performance of a WBAN when the effect of noise, interference and multipath fading are considered. The system performance is presented in terms of the bit error rate and outage probability as a function of the bit energy, multipath intensity profile, and number of active sensors. Results are obtained by numerical evaluation and simulation using MATLAB. Results show that the performance of the WBAN system is affected by the multipath channel parameters.