Secure and Resource-Efficient MIMO-OFDM-Based Wireless ECG Transmission Using Lightweight Cryptography on Spartan-6 FPGA

Secure transmission of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals is critical in modern health monitoring systems, where protecting patient confidentiality and ensuring data integrity are essential. This study presents a hardware-efficient approach that integrates Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) with a Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) framework to protect ECG signal transmission. The proposed method leverages minimal logic resources and a simplified key schedule to achieve robust security with low computational overhead. To further improve reliability, turbo coding is applied to combat burst errors and Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) inherent in wireless channels. Performance evaluation of the LWC-MIMO-OFDM system is carried out using ECG signals from the MIT Arrhythmia Database, with implementation and testing on a Spartan-6 FPGA platform. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in terms of area utilization, latency, power efficiency, and overall security performance, making it suitable for secure biomedical applications.