Designing a 60 GHz Sub-Milliwatt Transceiver for Wireless Body-Area-Networks

In this paper we discuss the design of a wireless front-end for the Tactile Internet with human in the loop, which requires compact communication units. In order to reduce the antenna size a 60 GHz low complexity non-coherent transceiver architecture is proposed, employing on-off keying. Since operation at 60 GHz has high power demands, the concept of aggressive duty-cycling is investigated in order to reduce the average power consumption. Limits of the introduced approach are evaluated by discussing the relations between data rate, average power consumption and necessary on-times of transmitter and receiver. We show that the proposed concept permits a transceiver power consumption of 1mW at a data rate of 1 Mbps.