PPM coding schemes with super-regenerative receiver for autonomous wireless BANs

We present a low-power wireless solution for energy autonomous wireless body area networks (WBANs) by using a super-regenerative receiver with suitable channel codes. To find corresponding ideal signalling schemes based on envelope detection, the capacity of the noncoherent AWGN channel with multi-level inputs is first studied. These investigations show that asymmetric on-off keying is efficient when the power budget is limited. Therefore, pulse-position modulation (PPM) and Reed Solomon coded PPM are proposed as practical signalling and schemes. Simulation and emulation results both illustrate that the transmit power of wireless bio-sensors can be reduced dramatically by using the proposed schemes, relative to uncoded systems. Moreover, the effect of applying analog-to-digital convertors with different resolutions for the super-regenerative receiver is studied to find the minimum number of the required quantization bits.