A Framework on the Performance Analysis of Cooperative Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are deal with wireless networks in the human body. We describe the performance analysis of dual-hop cooperative relaying systems employing amplify-and-forward (AF) technique in WBANs over independent and nonnecessary identically distributed Gamma fading channels. More specifically, we present closed-form derivations of the outage probabilities (OP), symbol error probabilities (SEP) and ergodic capacity (EC) for fixed gain and channel state information (CSI)-assisted relaying techniques at arbitrary signal-to-noise-ratios (SNRs). We also deduce novel expressions in the high SNR region. By doing so, we can quantify the performance of system by the diversity and coding gains. Using the derived expressions as a starting point and for the case of Exponential fading, we consider three practical optimization scenarios. They are optimal relay position with fixed power allocation, power allocation under the fixed location of the relay and joint optimization of power allocation and relay position under a transmit power constraint. The Monte Carlo simulations are used to validate the accuracy of our derivations, where it is demonstrated that the proposed adaptive allocation method significantly outperforms the fixed allocation method.