Wireless Network

What will this research achieve?

Reliable wireless networks which operate at extremely low power, and do not suffer excessive interference. The work on this sub-project focuses on a number of aspects of wireless base-band and MAC design.

Channel Models for Radio around the Human Body

We have developed a significant library of radio channel measurements. The measurements include signal strength and power delay profiles for narrowband channels in the 400, 900 and 2400MHz bands.

Channel simulation 

We have developed a Matlab simulation which may be used to imitate the wireless channel between two points on the human body, when the person is moving slowly (eg. walking). The code is available here, under the following conditions of use:

1. Licensee must include a reference to NICTA and the following publication in any published work that makes use of the simulation: Smith, Zhang, Hanlen, Miniutti, Rodda, Gilbert; A simulator for the dynamic on-body propagation channel, 2009 IEEE Symposium on Antennas and Propagation
   

Raw channel measurement set

1. Licensee must include a reference to NICTA and the following publication in any published work that makes use of the Licensed Material: D. Smith, D. Miniutti, L. Hanlen, D. Rodda, B. Gilbert, Dynamic Narrowband Body Area Communications: Link-Margin Based Performance Analysis and Second-Order Temporal Statistics, in IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2010.
2. If Licensee alters the content of the Licensed Material or creates any derivative work, Licensee must include in the altered Licensed Material or derivative work prominent notices to ensure that any recipients know that they are not receiving the original Licensed Material.
3. Licensee may not use or distribute the Licensed Material or any derivative work for commercial purposes including but not limited to, licensing or selling the Licensed Material or using the Licensed Material for commercial gain.
4. The Licensed Material is provided 'AS IS', without any express or implied warranties. NICTA does not accept any responsibility for errors or omissions in the Licensed Material.
5. This original license notice must be retained in all copies or derivatives of the Licensed Material.
6. All rights not expressly granted to the Licensee are reserved by NICTA.

Channel measurement apparatus

Wearable Body Area Network testbed The device contains a programmable wireless transceiver which operates around the 2400MHz International Scientific and Medical (ISM) band. We can apply various MAC and timing synchronization algorithms, and develop star, multi-star or arbitrary network arrangements. The devices allow us to measure signal strength and network interference.    We have placed this testbed online under a creative commons license (see below) The hardware design is here

The hardware design is provided with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Shar Alike 2.5 Australia License, where use of the design requires reference to NICTA and the following publication in any published work that makes use of the design: Open-source Testbed for Body Area Networks:   200 sample/sec, 12 hrs Continuous Measurement.

The hardware design has been used in a number of measurement campaigns to evaluate performance of body-area-networks on and around the human body. Details of the set-up and the PCB layout are included in the zip file. We expect that as the standardization process moves forward, there will be a need to also standardize the measurement and modeling approaches used. Public hardware and data sets are an important part of this process.