Collaborative Research: CCSS: Low-Complexity Wireless Sensor Architectures Based on Asynchronous Processing

这项合作研究的重点是高度小型化、低复杂性、低功耗的无线传感器的新设计原理及其分析。近年来，集成无线传感器出现在医疗保健、监控、智能建筑、减灾和环境监测等广泛应用中。然而，植入式生物电势传感器或用于测量机械应力的潜水式传感器等新应用要求现有最先进的传感器硬件进一步小型化。作为一个额外的挑战，由于需要执行多通道侦听，这些应用通常需要显著增加的传输数据速率。因此，这些方法需要设计非常低功耗的传感器硬件架构，以支持在这些高速数据链路上可靠和安全的传输。与其研究传统传感器体系结构、信号处理技术和前向纠错(FEC)策略的性能以满足这些具有挑战性的要求，本研究的目标是寻找和研究新的低复杂性异步通信和纠错策略，这些策略是为这类新兴的高度小型化、低功耗的集成无线传感器量身定做的。这项研究的结果有可能消除基于同步信号处理的传统传感器硬件所带来的功率和吞吐量限制，从而使许多传感应用领域取得重大进展。特别是，所提出的研究能够对许多采用低功率调制方案的其他应用提供显著的变革性影响，甚至在传感器系统领域之外。该项目的另一个重要方面是结合了私人投资机构的跨学科优势的教育计划。这包括将研究成果整合到现有的课程、学生交流、会议教程，以及开放获取建议传感器架构的所有细节。建议的项目将以跨学科的方式利用电路设计、信号处理、编码、通信理论和实践的思想，显著提高集成低功耗、低复杂性、高数据速率无线传感器设计的最新水平。具体地说，将通过设计传感器接口上的异步增量调制与无线无线电接口上的异步超宽带(UWB)传输来开发集成无线传感器的系统解决方案，以广泛地降低传感器硬件的功耗。此外，为了确保传感器在噪声通信链路上以保证的可靠性工作，分析了新的具有低复杂度编码的非二进制FEC方案，其数据符号由异步定时信息和脉冲符号组成。研究了一种基于开关电容幅度采样电路的新型异步传感器信号接口的设计和性能；研究了基于异步数据调制的传感器有效前向纠错方案的公开问题；以及开发和分析了一种基于频移键控开关键控调制的超宽带数据传输异步无线电接口。

This collaborative research focuses on novel design principles for highly miniaturized low-complexity low-power wireless sensors and their analysis.In recent years integrated wireless sensors have emerged in a wide range of applications including health care, surveillance, smart buildings, disaster mitigation, and environment monitoring. However, new applications as implantable bio-potential sensors or submersible sensors for measuring mechanical stress require further miniaturization of existing state-of-the-art sensors hardware. As an additional challenge, these applications often require a significantly increased transmission data rate due to the need to perform multichannel sensing. Consequently, these approaches require the design of very low-power sensor hardware architectures, which can support reliable and secure transmission over these high-speed data links. Rather than studying the performance of traditional sensor architectures, signal processing techniques, and forward error correction (FEC) strategies for these challenging requirements, the goal of the proposed research is find and study novel low-complexity asynchronous communication and error correction strategies that are tailored to this emerging class of highly miniaturized low-power integrated wireless sensors. The results of this study have the potential to remove the power and throughput limitations given by traditional sensor hardware based on synchronous signal processing, and thus to enable significant advances in many sensing applications. In particular, the proposed research is able to provide a significant transformative impact on many other applications employing low-power modulation schemes, even outside the field of sensor systems. Another important aspect of the project is the education plan that combines the cross-disciplinary strengths of the PIs. This includes the integration of the research results into existing curricula, student exchanges, conference tutorials, and open access to all details of the proposed sensor architectures.The proposed project will significantly advance the state-of-the-art in integrated low-power low-complexity high-data-rate wireless sensor design by employing ideas from circuit design, signal processing, coding, and communication theory and practice in an interdisciplinary fashion. Specifically, a systematic solution for integrated wireless sensors will be developed by devising asynchronous delta modulation on the sensor interface in combination with asynchronous ultra wideband (UWB) transmission on the wireless radio interface in order to extensively decrease the power consumption of the sensor hardware. Further, to ensure that the sensor operates with guaranteed reliability over the noisy communication link, new non-binary FEC schemes with low complexity encoding are analyzed, whose data symbols consist of both asynchronous timing information and pulse signs. In particular, the project contributions are 1) to study design and properties of a novel asynchronous sensor signal interface based on a switched-capacitor amplitude sampling circuit; 2) to investigate the open problem of efficient FEC solutions for sensors based on asynchronous data modulation; and 3) to develop and analyze an asynchronous radio interface based on frequency shift keying on-off keying modulation for UWB data transmission.