This paper presents a low power radio design tailored to the short distance, low data rate application of body area networks. In our analysis we consider a comparison between traditional continuous wave radios and ultra wide band impulse radios for this application space. We analyze the energy/bit requirement for each of the architectures and discuss how a duty-cycled radio is better suited to low data rate applications due to practical design considerations. As a proof-of-concept we present the design and measured results of a duty-cycled, noncoherent impulse radio transceiver. The designed transceiver was measured to consume only 19 W at a data-rate of 100 kbps. The design gives a BER of 10 5 and works for a range of 2.5 m at an average Rx-sensitivity of 81 dBm. The designed transceiver enables both OOK and BPSK schemes and can be configured to use a pseudocoherent self-correlated signature detection and generation mechanism. This added functionality helps distinguish different types of pulses such as timing and data-pulses in real time. The transceiver was designed in a 90 nm CMOS process and occupies 2.3 mm 2 area.Index Terms-Body-area-networks, impulse radio, noncoherent detection, ultralow-power radio, ultrawideband (UWB), wireless sensor networks.

Due to the heterogeneity and versatility of emerging services and applications in wireless networks, it has been a great challenge on improving the network utility by taking advantage of the spatial and temporal diversity of radio resource consumption. This paper is committed to solving this problem by introducing a service-aware spectrum sharing algorithm (SSA) in a joint radio resource management (JRRM) architecture, where a spectrum pool is adopted for leisure spectrum resource management in heterogeneous wireless networks. Based on an objective utility function, the JRRM unit could optimize the spectrum scheduling decisions for the composing networks with awareness of the related supporting services. Moreover, to facilitate a precise decision process, we illustrate an transmission rate requirement prediction model (TRPM) that is adaptive to the system condition variants to forecast service requests. Experiment results show that the proposed SSA can solidly enhance the system performance in terms of radio resource usage ratio, system throughput, user service access ratio, and eventually achieve better network utility.