RF Transceivers for Wireless Body Area Network Controllers

This paper focuses on the system and circuit level consideration of radio frequency front-end transceivers dedicated to WBAN controllers. We show how highly digitized transceivers employing sigma–delta modulators can achieve the frequency agility required by WBAN controllers. The paper compares the performance and highlights the pros and cons of I/Q transmitters and polar transmitters. For the receiver, different sigma–delta based RF receiver architectures are presented. These architectures are compared with more conventional architectures in terms of their suitability to WBAN controllers. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.