This paper presents hybrid type-II automatic repeat request (H-ARQ) for wireless wearable body area networks (BANs) based on ultra wideband (UWB) technology. The proposed model is based on three schemes, namely, high rate optimized rate compatible punctured convolutional codes (HRO-RCPC), Reed Solomon (RS) invertible codes and their concatenation. Forward error correction (FEC) coding is combined with simple cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error detection. The performance is investigated for two channels: CM3 (on-body to on-body) and CM4 (on-body to a gateway) scenarios of the IEEE802.15.6 BAN channel models for BANs. It is shown that the improvement in performance in terms of throughput and error protection robustness is very significant. Thus, the proposed H-ARQ schemes can be employed and optimized to suit medical and non-medical applications. In particular we propose the use of FEC coding for non-medical applications as those require less stringent quality of service (QoS), while the incremental redundancy and ARQ configuration is utilized only for medical applications. Thus, higher QoS is guaranteed for medical application of BANs while allowing coexistence with non-medical applications.

A switching type-II hybrid ARQ scheme with rate compatible punctured turbo (RCPT) codes is proposed in this letter. The proposed scheme combines three retransmission schemes by minimizing a cost function that yields a compromise between throughput and delay time. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated by computer simulations. Compared with conventional hybrid ARQ algorithms, the proposed algorithm can offer almost the same throughput performance with smaller time delay.

Effective and simply realizable rate compatible low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are proposed. A parity check matrix is constructed with the progressively increased column weights (PICW) order and adopted to achieve a punctured LDPC coding scheme for a wide range of the code rates of the rate compatible systems. Using the proposed rate compatible punctured LDPC codes, low complex adaptive communication systems, such as wireless communication systems, can be achieved with the reliable transmissions.