Performance evaluation of transdermal optical wireless communication using spatial diversity techniques

Abstract

Active medical implants and other contemporary medical applications need a dependable, high-speed communication channel between external and internal transceivers. Optical wireless communications have demonstrated advantages over widely used radio frequency technology in terms of data speeds, bandwidth abundance, and immunity to interference. Regretfully, this advantage implies strict alignment requirements for both sending and receiving ends. This study focuses on the effects of using multiple transmitters or receivers under the influence of pointing error on the transcutaneous link's overall performance measured by the outage probability and outage rate. Spatial diversity techniques have demonstrated their viability in increasing the link's reliability in free space optical communications. This drives the investigation of improvement transdermal communication system by adding numerous transmitters or receivers. Various misalignment severities are used to represent different operating circumstances, and these analyses result in explicit closed-form formulas for the relevant metrics. The findings clearly show the benefits of employing multiple transmitters and receivers on the link's outage performances. A notable improvement in the average signal-to-noise ratio values for the outage probability and outage rate compared to the single input single output setup was achieved. Furthermore, the theoretical conclusions are subsequently confirmed by MATLAB-based Monte-Carlo simulation for several instructive cases.