Highly available FPGA-based smart band for WBAN

This paper presents an FPGA-based smart band for health monitoring applications in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). The FPGA-based smart band design embeds a softcore processor and its allocated SRAM block, and auxiliary modules. This paper introduces a novel scheme for full initial configuration and Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration through the WLAN network on the FPGA. Transient faults including Single Event Upsets (SEU) and Multiple Event Upsets (MEU) could be mitigated using fault tolerant techniques on FPGA depending on the working environment. The processor is protected by a watchdog while the memory is protected by SEC-DED. Two working environments are studied: a normal environment and a harsh environment. Transient faults in the auxiliary modules are overcome using TMR and 5MR in the normal and harsh environment, respectively. The availability of the system has been quantified using Markov Models and a case study is presented.