Highly flexible WBAN transmit-receive system based on USRP

Wireless body area network (WBAN) attracts significant interest nowadays. Because of its support of various QoS and communicate modes, when a SoC based on WBAN is developed, the first challenge we faced with is to test the high level algorithm in real environment and select proper values for system parameters. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a prototype for WBAN narrowband transmit-receive system with high flexibility for healthcare applications. The system is implemented on GNURadio and universal software radio peripheral (USRP) platforms. Along with hardware platform, the system is tested on 950MHz under different modulate modes, upsample rates and roll off factors of pulse shaping filter. Testing results show that packet error rate (PER) of the system reaches 0.03% when the data modulated by GMSK and upsampled 8 times. With the prototyping, the system requirements of a WBAN SoC for healthcare could be determined, and then its architecture design could be enabled.