Reliability of LT Codes under Dynamic Channel Conditions in Wearable Body Area Network

Body Area Network (BAN) is considered as a promising technology for numerous applications, such as healthcare services. BAN is in high requirement for reliable information transmission especially for vital physiological signs. As the external environments and human body motions make the channel characteristics vary frequently, which results in high package error probability and low reliability, the codes with fixed code rate are not suitable. In this paper, we use LT codes to automatically adapt to the time-varying channel condition. LT codes were firstly proposed to provide reliability for erasure channel, followed by fading channel. The efficiency of LT codes in BAN had been analyzed by simulation, only considering the medical implant communications service. Hence, we conduct a large number of experiments to analyze and verify the adaptability of LT codes to dynamic channel especially in wearable BAN. In order to carry on a comprehensive analysis, the reliability of LT codes are tested under different scenarios, such as indoor and outdoor scenes. The influence of human motion and transmission distance are also taken into account. The results demonstrate that LT codes have a good performance of reliability over on-body communication channel.