Low-power body-coupled transceiver for miniaturized body area networks

Abstract

As wearable devices continue to proliferate, seamlessly integrating them into wireless body-area networks (WBANs) becomes increasingly crucial. Body-coupled communication (BCC) emerges as a promising WBAN technology, utilizing the human body itself as a transmission channel. This paper presents a novel BCC transceiver designed for efficiency and miniaturization. The proposed transceiver prioritizes reliable data transmission with a convolutional encoder. It leverages a simple direct digital synthesizer (DDS) for frequency shift keying (FSK) modulation, minimizing chip area. At the receiver, a Viterbi decoder (VD) ensures accurate data recovery. This design shines in its resource efficiency. It occupies less than 1% of an Artix-7 FPGA, operates at 268.77 MHz with a mere 111 mW power consumption, and achieves a remarkable data rate of 13.78 Mbps. This translates to a hardware efficiency of 44.46 Kbps/slice, surpassing existing transceivers. Moreover, the BCC transceiver exhibits a stellar bit error rate (BER) of over 10⁻⁷ under realistic body channel conditions. Overall, this work presents a highly efficient BCC transceiver with significant improvements in chip area, power consumption, and data rate compared to existing designs. This paves the way for practical and miniaturized WBAN solutions for future wearable applications.