Hardware implementation of NB PHY baseband transceiver for IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN

This paper presents the FPGA implementation of Narrowband Physical Layer architecture for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) based on IEEE 802.15.6-2012 standard. An abstract level hardware implementation of the most matured Narrowband (NB) PHY operating at 2.4 GHz ISM band among the three PHY layers defined by the standard is proposed. Major building blocks of PHY transceiver such as CRC, spreader, interleaver and scrambler were individually designed and integrated. To avoid the inherent limitation of the data transmission and to achieve higher reliability especially for medical applications, BCH (63, 51, 2) encoder and decoder is integrated to the design. Before modulation, spreading technique is employed and supports pi/2 DBPSK modulation. The transceiver achieves a data rate of 121.4 kbps and packet size of 256 bits. The design has been simulated in Questa 10.1.d, synthesized in Xilinx ISE 14.4 and successfully implemented and tested on ML605 Evaluation Board through PCIe interface. The proposed design can interact with Microblaze processor and the board can be interfaced with Analog Devices FMC-Communication Board, AD-FCOMMS1-EBZ.