IR-UWB communication systems have become popular for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications in recent times. This paper presents the development and testing of an IR-UWB coordinator node that includes an IR-UWB receiver front-end and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based controller. The IR-UWB receiver front-end down converts the high frequency (3.5-4.5 GHz) IR-UWB pulses using a mixer and a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) in to easily detectable base band pulses. IR-UWB pulse synchronization is implemented using the FPGA. The performance of the receiver node is experimentally evaluated by conducting Bit Error Rate (BER) analysis for an on-body to off-body communication scenario. The BER results show that a BER of 104is achievable for a propagation distance of 1m using the IR-UWB coordinator node described in this paper.

The basic requirement of wireless healthcare monitoring systems is to send physiological signals acquired from implantable or on-body sensor nodes to a remote location. Low-power consumption is required for wireless healthcare monitoring systems since most medical sensor nodes are battery powered. The emergence of new technologies in measuring physiological signals has increased the demand for high data rate transmission systems. Ultra-wide band (UWB) is a suitable wireless technology to achieve high data rates while keeping power consumption and form factors small. Although UWB transmitters are designed based on simple techniques, UWB receivers require complex hardware and consume comparatively higher power. In order to achieve reliable low power two-way communication, a sensor node can be constructed using a UWB transmitter and a narrow band receiver. This paper proposes a new medium access control (MAC) protocol based on a dual-band physical layer technology. Co-simulation models based on MATLAB and OPNET have been developed to analyze the performance of the proposed MAC protocol. We analyzed the performance of the MAC protocol for a realistic scenario where both implantable and wearable sensor nodes are involved in the data transmission. Priority-based packet transmission techniques have been used in the MAC protocol to serve different sensors according to their QoS requirements. Analysis is done with regard to important network parameters, such as packet loss ratio, packet delay, percentage throughput, and power consumption.