Preliminary study of superregenerative wake-up receiver for WBANs

A superregenerative wake-up receiver with addressing capability (SR-WUR) for medical and wireless body area networks (WBAN) is proposed in this paper. The SR-WUR is based on a self-quenched superregenerative oscillator (SRO) which enables high sensitivity while maintaining low power consumption. Due to the high sensitivity, low transmit power can be used, which reduces the energy radiation towards a human body. In this work, the SRO is exploited in a novel manner. The SRO charges a voltage multiplier that is used to detect the transmitted bit. The SRO also generates the self-quench and provides a clock signal for a digital logic which processes the received bits. The SR-WUR design is scalable for different type of wireless network applications because the front-end configuration can be changed. Therefore, it can be easily integrated to different type of WBAN platforms. The SR-WUR performance is estimated by using simulations for the back-end components and mathematical analysis for an example front-end configuration. The example configuration includes a low noise amplifier that improves sensitivity of the receiver and it provides isolation between SRO and antenna. Results show that the SR-WUR sensitivity and average power consumption with the example front-end configuration are -84.8 dBm and 186 μW, respectively. Therefore, the proposed SR-WUR has potential to improve the overall energy efficiency, and to reduce the radiated power of wake-up signaling, which are important design goals in medical applications.