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

本合作研究的重点是高度小型化、低复杂度、低功耗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广泛的应用中，包括医疗保健、监视、智能建筑、减灾和环境监测。然而，新的应用，如植入式生物电位传感器或用于测量机械应力的潜水传感器，需要进一步小型化现有的最先进的传感器硬件。作为一个额外的挑战，由于需要执行多通道传感，这些应用通常需要显着增加传输数据速率。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。而不是研究传统的传感器架构，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，提出的研究目标是发现和研究新的低复杂度异步通信和纠错策略，这些策略是为这种新兴的高度小型化低功耗集成无线传感器量身定制的。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，从而在许多传感应用中取得重大进展。特别是，所提出的研究能够为许多其他采用低功率调制方案的应用提供重大的变革性影响，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pi的跨学科优势的教育计划。这包括将研究成果整合到现有课程、学生交流、会议教程中，并开放获取拟议传感器架构的所有细节。该项目将以跨学科的方式采用电路设计、信号处理、编码和通信理论与实践的思想，显著推进集成低功耗、低复杂性、高数据速率无线传感器设计的最新技术。具体而言，将通过在传感器接口上设计异步增量调制并结合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，以广泛降低传感器硬件的功耗。进一步，为了保证传感器在噪声通信链路上的可靠运行，分析了新的低复杂度编码的非二进制FEC方案，该方案的数据符号由异步时序信息和脉冲符号组成。具体来说，该项目的贡献是：1)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特性；2)研究基于异步数据调制的传感器高效FEC解决方案的开放性问题；3)开发并分析了一种基于移频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.