SHORT RANGE WIRELESS STANDARDS: AN OVERVIEW

Sachin Gupta*, Department of Electrical and Instrumentation Engineering, Thapar University, Patiala

Abstract- Bioinformatics is an emerging field in which vital parameters are collected and measured to diagnose the condition of a patient. For the sake of flexibility and comfort of a patient during diagnose process, it is necessary to use a wireless technology. So here in this paper a basic overview of network establishment is discussed, and various parameters of short range wireless standards of ANT+, Bluetooth, Zigbee are compared and analysed. Key terms: standards. Bioinformatics, wireless

1. Introduction Within few decades, the field of bioinformatics is growing rapidly. Till now the vital parameters related to human body like ECG, PPG, Heart Rate etc are measured using Portable and Bulky modules. Before and after the treatment, patient has to tie up with these heavy modules through wires for diagnosis and treatment purposes.

In this situation, patient is not allowed to move and sometimes feels uncomfortable. This will directly affect on his recovery period. But now with the advancement in technology these machines are replaced with lightweight and wearable modules. Even now with Wireless technology, patient needs not to tie up with modules through wires and he is free to move. The sensors are tied on the patient body and data is send to GUI through radio frequencies [1][2]. Wireless modules are act like a RS232 serial port for sending data in the form of Packets. According to IEEE, Bluetooth, Zigbee, UWB, WiFi, ANT+ are popular wireless standards for establishing short range communication. But Bluetooth, zigbee, and ANT+ are reliable while considering cost, power consumption and network protocols[3][4]. Here in this paper we are comparing and analysing existing wireless standards for transmission of vital parameters. 2. General Network Establishment In market, wireless standards are available in the form of evaluation boards, and dongles. They are having various necessary components on a single package called SOC (system on chip). They are having a high speed microcontroller which are connected with a RF module through SPI, UART, or serial ports. These RF modules consist of inbuilt and predefined set of protocols in the form of hardware and software. The RF module is also called baseband modulator. A user defined layer

Fig1. Patient under Diagnosis

of protocol (application layer in the form of software) is available with this module. Through this user can set the specifications according to the need of application like baud rate, Packet length, master or slave mode, and topology. This helps to establish a easy and flexible communication. basic module is shown in figure 2.

(1MHz) channels. Each channel is further divided into time slots of 625s. The data is sending in the form of packet/slot. After sending one complete packet with one or more slots, the channel is hoped to next band. In Bluetooth, the speed of hopping is 1600 hopes/s. Bluetooth architecture recognizes two types of devices, Master and Slave. Master sends the data to slave. As channels are hopped in a random fashion. The slave must be tuned to master clock for FH. Each packet of data consists of payload (actual data) and overhead (additional information like access code, CRC). Bluetooth provides payload of 0 to 2745 bits. The maximum data rate is 1Mb/s. Bluetooth support piconet and scatter net type of networking between the devices. B. ZIGBEE

Fig2: Basic wireless evaluation module

3. Overview of Wireless Technologies This session introduce the profiles, protocol stacks, Network architecture of Bluetooth, zigbee and ANT+ standards. A. BLUETOOTH Bluetooth is also known as IEEE 802.15.1 standard. Due to the demand of users regarding the short range air communication, in 1998 various leading companies tie together (SIG) to make a common interoperable wireless standard to fulfil the need and were named as Bluetooth. There are various applications developed on Bluetooth related to bioinformatics like sending ECG, Heart Rate, and Heart sounds. For maintaining a standard over worldwide an unlicensed RF frequency band of 2.45GHz-ISM band is selected for establishment of network. On this band, effect of interference like microwaves, radiations (which are unpredictable) are uncontrollable. To prevent this, frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) technique is used with GFSK modulation. FH divide the frequency band into 79 narrow bandwidth

Zigbee is also known as IEEE 802.15.14 standard. Zigbee was designed due to meet the requirement of low data rate, low cost and low power wireless standard in 2000. In bioinformatics, zigbee is used where application is developed for monitoring and controlling purpose only, because of low data rate. Three frequency bands are available in zigbee worldwide. The ISM band 2.4GHz with 16 channels and data rate of 250kb/s is used globally. The 915MHz band with 10 channels and data rate of 40kb/s is used in USA and Australia. In Europe 868MHz band with only one channel and data rate of 20kb/s is used. The above mentioned data rate may be lower due to protocol overheads. The maximum packet size is 127 bytes including payload and overhead. The size for payload is 104 byte. Unlike Bluetooth zigbee has optional acknowledgement mechanism during communication in his MAC layer. In zigbee direct sequence spread spectrum technique is used with DQPSK modulation. In DS, data bits are added with higher data rate bits (Redundant bits) which are also called chipping codes. The signal gets spread and send over 22MHz channel. The numbers of channels are listed previously. The gap

between two is 5MHz. Zigbee architecture recognizes two types of devices FFD (Full Function Devices) become the network coordinator and RFD (Reduced Function Device).RFD cant be a router. Zigbee supports star, mesh, and cluster tree types of topologies.

Fig3: Zigbee Network Topologies

C. ANT+ Ant+ is Proprietary wireless technology. Similar to zigbee Ant+ is designed to meet the requirement of low cost, and low power wireless standard. It is mainly designed for biomedical applications using 2.45GHz RF spectrum. ANT+ communication is based on TDMA like isochronous channel networking with single and eight channel versions. It can

Transmit maximum 1 Mbps raw data. The size of payload size is 8 bytes maximum with minimum overhead as compare to other wireless technologies. As compare to zigbee, in this nodes can be a transmitter, or a receiver hence no need of Host controller. the size and complexity of ANT+ is very flexible and efficient as compare to others. As ANT+ is embedded with Nordics RF transceiver, it consumes less current to transmit Payload. It supports Mesh, Tree, Peer to Peer topologies. ANT+ is a readymade package for a user to set up a wireless sensor network.

In this section various parameters are compared. 4. Conclusion From the table, it is concluded that ANT+ is more flexible are robust as compare to others. it consumes very less power, hence it can be easily implemented on battery operated devices. Latency of ANT+ is highest. 5. References [1]

3. Comparative Analysis