In at least some embodiments, a communication device includes a transceiver with a physical (PHY) layer. The PHY layer is configured for body area network (BAN) operations in a limited multipath environment based on a constant symbol rate for BAN packet transmissions and based on M-ary PSK, differential M-ary PSK or rotated differential M-ary PSK modulation. The PHY layer is configured to construct a physical-layer service data unit (PSDU) based on a concatenate block, an insert shortened bits block, a Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri, Hocquenghem (BCH) encoder, a remove shortened bits block, an add pad bits block, a spreader, a bit interleaver, a scrambler, and a symbol mapper.