WNoC - a microelectronic system architecture suitable for biomedical wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost microelectronic system architecture suitable for single chip CMOS integration. The system architecture consists of a large set of on-chip processing-cores, sensors, and four multi-standard wireless border cores that are interconnected to form an ultra-fast microelectronic network of distributed-computing systems. Our main application areas are: biomedical emergency monitoring systems and healthcare. The hardware platform is based on network-on-chip (NoC) design and RF circuitry for wireless connectivity. We focus on the design of this wireless network-on-chip (WNoC). WNoC faces several challenges. A main issue of concern from the application point of view is to have the design support the convergence to a decision within acceptable periods of time, because time is critical in many medical healthcare applications. We define a mechanism to enable many WNoCs to interact together over the wireless media. A key result is a design and protocol for internal and external WNoC communications between the main and backup wireless cores. We run simulations on a biomedical monitoring system for emergency situations, and our results show that the time to converge to a medical warning is in the range of milliseconds, which is acceptable for the related medical scenarios