UWB Radio for Body Area Network – RUBY

BAN (Body Area Networks) has become a well-known acronym during the last years, It encompasses scenarios where several wireless sensors and actuators are located on the human body to sense different information (e.g. physiological, environmental, contextual) and send them over the air to a remote unit which processes, forwards, takes decisions, alerts, records, etc.

Today, early BAN systems emerge but are either highly optimised for a particular application, It turns out that the wide span of existing solutions for BAN (from healthcare to sport through leisure systems) makes the definition of a standardized air interface highly challenging.

Despite this, an important effort was conducted during the last few years towards the definition of such a standard, flexible enough in terms of implementation as well as in terms of performances, to fulfil the need of the huge majority of existing and foreseen BAN applications.

The adoption of such a standard for a BAN air interface is a very important step as it will permit different devices, to interoperate, coordinate themselves and exchange information. Consequently, what was before a proprietary and dedicated point-to-point air interface will become an open standard, able to provide guaranteed interoperability and quality of service. It is expected that such an evolution gives birth to a lot of new applications and changes the way people interact with their personal electronics devices.

Nevertheless, to be able to efficiently cover the needs of the widespread BAN applications, some innovative technical approaches are needed. This is why Ultra Wide Band Impulse Radio (UWB-IR), thanks to its intrinsic flexibility, scalability and to its potential for ultra low power implementation, is seen as one of the best candidate technology.
- Energy saving potential of IR-UWB.
- Typical emitted power could be 2 decade under allowed Max SAR

This statement is gaining momentum since a few years. On the other side, one can argue that existing BAN implementation of an UWB-IR radio system are very limited. It is true that, given some current of cost and power consumption expectations, hardware implementation of a UWB Impulse Radio system still carry some difficulty that may be able to delay the standard's adoption if not solved.

RUBY intends to tackle this point. The goal of the project is to propose and implement an innovative UWB impulse radio system that will be particularly well suited to Body Area Network, thanks to:
- An innovative RF front end, establishing pioneering receiver architecture, inspired by and taking benefits of both coherent and non-coherent receiver, that will permit to reach promising RF performances without harming complexity and power consumption.
- A fully integrated (single chip) transceiver, operating in the low UWB band, able to demonstrate feasability of such an integration
- A pionnering RF design, optimized to allow efficient UWB operation on the higher UWB band (6-8.5 GHz), were BAN can be used in conformance with European UWB regulation
- A very constrained analogue to digital conversion.
- An event-driven digital baseband who will be able to efficiently drive this new RF front end, that opens the way to a power-efficient design that is driven by events instead of a high speed clock signal
- Miniaturized UWB antenna designed to be used in the close vicinity of a human body

At the end of the project, RF circuits and baseband designed during the project will be integrated to form a prototype that will demonstrate over-the-body wireless video streaming from a worn mass storage device to a video glasses display. By showing the capacity to efficiently handle one of the most demanding BAN application in realistic condition, this demonstration will permit to validate the consortium's scientific choices.