Design and implementation of a digital HBC coordinator for Body Area Network

Considering the bottleneck of energy efficiency and reliability in the pervasive and personalized wearable healthcare management based on Human Body Communication (HBC), an all-digital extraordinary HBC coordinator is proposed, as a configurable hub in the baseband system for Body Area Network (BAN). The unique HBC coordinator in a BAN is capable of enhancing the control, and programming of the network system, as the core of the BAN and gateway between body sensor nodes and the devices outside of body. With emphasis on power consumption and high data rate, The implementation of network management unit in the HBC coordinator, equipped with a dynamic lookup table, not only keeps memory for the nodes paired before, but also makes improvements in retransmission mechanism in multipoint communication, and can be initialized whenever you want. Thereby the HBC coordinator chip has been typed out and achieves miniaturized physical size of 0.8mm
²
in 0.13-um standard CMOS technology. It periodically monitors the data transmission with 15 nodes with less than 126.75uW and the operation is successfully demonstrated on our test system board.