Energy-efficient Reactive Radio Design in Body Area Networks

A wireless body area network (WBAN) consists of several mobile devices worn on the human body. WBANs have enormous potential in health monitoring systems as it eliminates the inconvenience of having wires around the patient's body, offering more freedom of movement and comfort, enhanced monitoring, and the administration of at-home treatment. Low power consumption is crucial for such applications due to the limited capacity of portable batteries. The power consumption of wireless communication is especially important since it typically consumes the majority of the energy in such systems.
There are generally two ways to solve this energy constraint, which are reducing the power consumption or harvesting the energy from external sources. In this thesis, we approach this in both ways. First, we reduce the RF communication power considering the wireless communication channel in WBAN. Second, we scavenge the energy from propagating radio waves. Since first method is reducing the power consumption and second method adapts power harvesting, these two methods can be applied concurrently.
The final goal of this research is to provide a single chip solution for an energy-efficient reactive transceiver in WBAN. This single chip solution has 3 components, a wake-up receiver, communication receiver, and UWB transmitter.