An Energy-Efficient Carrier Synchronization Method for Galvanic Coupling Intra-Body Communication

Intra-body communication will facilitate next-generation personalized medicine by enabling interconnection among implanted devices. To this purpose, energy-efficient communication technologies are required such as galvanic coupling (GC). Although some GC testbeds have been developed to implement the entire communication chain, synchronization problems have not yet been tackled exhaustively. While some papers simply assume a-priori perfect synchronization between GC transmitter and receiver, other studies developed solutions that often are time-consuming. In this paper, an energy-efficient and fast maximum-log-likelihood (ML) synchronization method is proposed, that can operate in real time and follow channel variations. Experiments reveal that the proposed ML synchronization scheme is very effective for short-range GC communication up to 4 cm, with performance similar to the current State-of-the-Art. It shows slightly lower performance levels for higher distances, still it offers the benefit of lower computational requirements than the reference method.