Exploration for energy-efficient ECC decoder of WBAN

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been widely applied to biomedical applications today, in which error-correcting code (ECC) is utilized to improve reliability. In WBAN, ECC overhead can be comparable to transmit power because of the extremely short transmission distance. Therefore, as the most power-hungry component, ECC decoder should be carefully designed. In this letter, we first present an exploration for energy efficient ECC decoder in various practical scenarios of WBAN. A framework is proposed for the exploration based on an energy efficiency model of WBAN, in which all significant parameters within the design space are considered. Taking advantage of the model, we evaluate the energy efficiency of WBAN nodes when type-II Chase soft-decision decoder or hard-decision decoder is utilized. The exploration determines energy-efficient decoder for each scenario and shows that energy-efficient decoder can achieve as much as 80% higher energy efficiency than the alternative.