Hardware implementation of an IR-UWB coordinator node for WBAN applications

IR-UWB communication systems have become popular for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications in recent times. This paper presents the development and testing of an IR-UWB coordinator node that includes an IR-UWB receiver front-end and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based controller. The IR-UWB receiver front-end down converts the high frequency (3.5-4.5 GHz) IR-UWB pulses using a mixer and a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) in to easily detectable base band pulses. IR-UWB pulse synchronization is implemented using the FPGA. The performance of the receiver node is experimentally evaluated by conducting Bit Error Rate (BER) analysis for an on-body to off-body communication scenario. The BER results show that a BER of 10⁴ is achievable for a propagation distance of 1m using the IR-UWB coordinator node described in this paper.