PPM Based super-regenerative receiver for body area networks (BAN)

The main bottleneck to achieve energy autonomy in body area networks (BAN) is the design of an ultra low power yet reliable wireless system. It is well known that super-regenerative receiver has the advantage of enabling ultra low power. However, in many cases, it has to use on-off keying (OOK) modulation due to the embedded envelope detector and thus has limited reliability. To improve its performance to enable new BAN applications, we propose to use the pulse-position modulation (PPM) instead of the conventional OOK. In this paper, we first proved that PPM can outperform OOK in information theory. Then, we developed a baseband algorithm suitable for the PPM based super-regenerative receiver. Finally, we provided both performance and power results based on our chip implementation of the proposed receiver. Our results demonstrated that PPM can achieve significant performance improvement with marginal power consumption increase compared with OOK. Thus, the proposed PPM based super-regenerative receiver is very suitable for BAN.