Challenges of the Internet of Things

5 Multi-standard Receiver for Medical IoT Sensor Networks

5.1. Introduction

The IEEE 802.15.6 standard [IEE 12a] is dedicated to wireless communications with very low energy consumption and coverage (range of 3 m) operating close to the human body to provide, in particular, reliable medical services such as the measurement of vital parameters and non-medical services such as entertainment in real time.

Unlike the UWB mode of the 802.15.6 standard, the narrow band mode [LEE 09] aims to become the Internet of Things (IoT) reference standard for the medical industry [CHE 15]. It is for this reason, and differently from research by [LEE 09, CHO 10, MAT 15, MAT 14, LIA 13], that this chapter focuses on this mode. Nevertheless, the narrow band mode of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard must coexist in the 2.4 GHz ISM band with large competitors such as the IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n (WiFi) [IEE 12b], IEEE 802.15.1 (Bluetooth) [IEE 05] and IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) [IEE 15].

In order to promote the development of the narrow band mode of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, we propose an OFDM receiver like [MIC 01] (with multiple orthogonal subcarriers) that can, for example, be used by a conventional WiFi receiver, and which would then serve as a multi-standard receiver.

This chapter is structured as follows: in section 5.2, we shall revisit the general context and describe the characteristics of various WiFi standards 802.11a/n/ac. Section 5.3 shall revisit the specificities of the WBAN standard signal. Section ...