A reconfigurable control system design for wireless body sensor network

Abstract

In this paper, a five-level reconfigurable control system is proposed for wireless body sensor network (WBSN). In this system, the bi-direction communication channel is separated into an instruction path and a data path. The instruction path consists of two different kinds of instructions. The first one is command instruction which provides parameters setting for the sensor nodes. The other one is reconfigurable instruction which serves control signals for executing the applications with the characteristics of loops or repetitions. In addition, a low-cost, low-power and high performance micro control unit (MCU) core is designed for this system. It consists of an asynchronous interface, a register bank, a reconfigurable filter, a slop-feature forecast, a lossless data encoder, an error correct coding (ECC) encoder, a UART interface, and a power management (PWM). Moreover, a multi-sensor controller and a reconfigurable memory were added to the proposed MCU design for various body sensors controlling and the loops or repetitions executing. This work achieves reductions of 83% instructions by comparing with a multi-sensor system without reconfigurable control system design. It gets both benefits of reducing the loading in software systems and saving power consumptions when transmits instructions. The MCU core for the reconfigurable control system was implemented by 0.18 μm CMOS process technology. The core area is 202,484 μm2 and the power is 2.9 mW operating at 100 MHz frequency.