This paper considers the use of infrared wireless communications for uplink transmission in extra wireless body-area networks. We focus on a multiuser medical application, where the collected medical data of several patients inside a hospital room is transmitted to one or several access points (APs). For this uplink transmission, we investigate the performance of optical code-division multiple access in asynchronous mode, while taking into account the effect of random transmitter orientation. For this purpose and to consider realistic scenarios, we implement an orientation-based random waypoint mobility model to consider the mobility of patients inside a hospital ward. Performance evaluation is done in terms of the link average bit-error-rate and outage probability. We further investigate the performance improvement by using several APs, compared with the case of a single AP. INDEX TERMS Wireless body area networks; Medical WBAN; Telemedicine; Wireless optical communications; Infrared data transmission; Optical code-division multiple access; Random waypoint model; Binary pulse-position modulation.

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