Error Performance Estimation of Modulated Retroreflective Transdermal Optical Wireless Links with Diversity under Generalized Pointing Errors

Abstract

Recent developments in both optical wireless communication (OWC) systems and implanted medical devices (IMDs) have introduced transdermal optical wireless (TOW) technology as a viable candidate for extremely high-speed in-body to out-of-body wireless data transmissions, which are growing in demand for many vital biomedical applications, including telemetry with medical implants, health monitoring, neural recording and prostheses. Nevertheless, this emerging communication modality is primarily hindered by skin-induced attenuation of the propagating signal bit carrier along with its stochastic misalignment-induced fading. Thus, by considering a typical modulated retroreflective (MRR) TOW system with spatial diversity and optimal combining (OC) for signal reception in this work, we focus, for the first time in the MRR TOW literature, on the stochastic nature of generalized pointing errors with non-zero boresight (NZB). Specifically, under these circumstances, novel analytical mathematical expressions were derived for the total average bit error rate (BER) of various system configurations. Their results revealed significant outage performance enhancements when spatial diversity was utilized. Moreover, taking into consideration the total transdermal pathloss along with the effects of stochastic NZB pointing errors, the critical average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) metric was evaluated for typical power spectral-density values.