ZebraBAN: a heterogeneous high-performance energy efficient wireless body sensor network

Recently, there are much research on wireless body sensor network (WBSN) as the growing demands of pervasive health and personal entertainment. Supporting high-speed data transmission becomes a challenge in development of WBSN in medical and entertainment applications. In this study, the authors present ZebraBAN, a high-speed low-power WBSN based on single-carrier ultra-wideband (SC-UWB) and IEEE 802.15.4. The heterogeneous network combines the strengths of SC-UWB and IEEE 802.15.4 technologies while offsetting their weakness. Like SC-UWB, the system achieves medium to high data rate and reduces radiation and power consumption at a low cost. Like IEEE 802.15.4, ZebraBAN achieves low data rate and low latency under low contention. In ZebraBAN, the authors introduce the idea of control plane and data plane for controlling multiple PHYs and MACs according to energy and data rate balance. Experimental results based on the prototype system are presented to evaluated the network performance. The result demonstrates that high reliability transmission for every sensor data stream within 4 m around the person, with a low-power consumption for fabricated application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) about 8.2 mW when it works on transmitting one channel video. The network has a peak capacity of 100 Mbps that could support multiple sensor nodes, including four channel video stream and multiple low-speed sensor datas.