Robust low power NB PHY baseband transceiver for IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN

The lack of healthcare services in outback areas raises the need for efficient remote health monitoring systems. IEEE 802.15.6 standard defines a new wireless communication standard for healthcare systems to mitigate this problem. Power consumption is the most crucial dilemma in such system. This paper proposes low power architecture of Narrowband Physical Layer transceiver for Wireless Body Area Network based on the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. A reconfigurable architecture was designed to select between DBPSK and DQPSK. Thus variable data rate up to 971.4 kbps is supported with variable packet sizes. The proposed transceiver was implemented and verified by MATLAB. The design was synthesized and implemented on both FPGA and ASIC. The implemented architecture consumes 162 μW, operates at a clock frequency of 6 MHz, and meets all the standard requirements.