A Framework for Implementation of Wireless Body Area Network over Software Defined Radios

Wireless Body Area Network over Software Defined Radio (SDR) Platform is the solution towards providing ubiquitous wireless health monitoring of patients over Internet. In this paper, a system is designed to enable ECG signals to be compressed and communicated to remote server at regular intervals over SDR platform comprised of Wireless Open Access Research Platform boards. To enable this, a TCP/IP based client-server model is proposed which allows data to be sent whenever the SDR channel is free. Test-bed analysis has shown that signal compression through Discrete Wavelet Transform by choosing the correct filter can provide significant 83.8% energy efficiency, without much data loss. This work provides the framework and highlights the open issues to develop the SDR platform into a Cognitive Radio module.