Joint Code Rate Compatible Design of DP-LDPC Code Pairs for Joint Source Channel Coding over Implant-to-External Channel

A CM2-S3 transmission link in wireless body area networks (WBAN) is implemented with a joint source channel coding (JSCC) system based on double protograph low-density parity-check (DP-LDPC) code pairs with high reliability and low power consumption. For the practicality and suitability considerations, the M-ary differential chaos shift keying scheme is introduced to modulate the CM2-S3 channel with better performance than the standard modulations in WBAN. Due to the non-Gaussian-like distribution of the CM2-S3 channel model, the initial joint protograph extrinsic information transfer (JPEXIT) algorithm does not work as a coding analysis tool. To solve this problem, a numerical Gaussian approximation is employed to modify the iterative mutual information function of the JPEXIT for achieving more precise output. Then, a joint code rate compatible (JCRC) method, designed with compatibility in resisting variable channel variances and adapting different source statistics, is proposed for optimizing the DP-LDPC code pairs. Based on the JCRC method, the code searching algorithm is simplified with lower complexity because of the reduced cycle-index. The simulation results show that optimized code pairs have better bit-error ratio performances compared to existing codes, which provides a strong technical support to promote high-quality data transmission in eHealthcare on the physical layer.