# A Software Defined Radio Evaluation Platform for WBAN Systems
## 5 Conclusions and Future Work  
With the development of modern technology, it becomes possible to establish an intelligent healthcare system that increases the efficiency of conventional medical systems. As the most fundamental element in the intelligent healthcare system, WBAN provides an ultra-low power, reliable, and efficient wireless communication channel for the data exchanging between the sensors and a hub. At the same time, WBAN implementations can be found in other areas, as well, such as that of vehicular networks [10]. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Hardware Resources** & **Resources Utilized** & **Utilization Ratio** \\ \hline LUTs & 13,186/297,600 & 4\% \\ Registers & 11,394/595,200 & 1\% \\ Memory & 121/1064 & 11\% \\ DSPs & 190/2016 & 9\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 6: Hardware utilization of the security scheme performed in the proposed evaluation platform for WBAN systems. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Band Group** & **Channel Number** & **Central Frequency (MHz)** & **Bandwidth (MHz)** & **Channel Attribute** \\ \hline \multirow{3}{*}{Low band} & 0 & 3494.4 & 499.2 & Optional \\  & 1 & 3993.6 & 499.2 & Mandatory \\  & 2 & 4492.8 & 499.2 & Optional \\ \hline \multirow{6}{*}{High band} & 3 & 6489.6 & 499.2 & Optional \\  & 4 & 6988.8 & 499.2 & Optional \\  & 5 & 7488.0 & 499.2 & Optional \\  & 6 & 7987.2 & 499.2 & Mandatory \\  & 7 & 8486.4 & 499.2 & Optional \\  & 8 & 8985.6 & 499.2 & Optional \\  & 9 & 9484.8 & 499.2 & Optional \\  & 10 & 9984.0 & 499.2 & Optional \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 7: UWB operating frequency bands. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline
**Hardware Resources** & **Resources Utilized** & **Utilization Ratio** \\ \hline Lookup tables (LUTs) & 14,805/297,600 & 4\% \\ Registers & 11,707/595,200 & 1\% \\ Memory & 81/1064 & 7\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: Hardware utilization of the baseband processing module performed in the proposed evaluation platform for WBAN systems. However, the lack of an evaluation platform for WBAN systems increases the complexity of designing novel systems for WBAN. Furthermore, evaluating WBAN designs on various platforms could cause unfair performance comparison among different designs intended for the same application. In this paper, an SDR evaluation platform implemented in MiniBEE4 is proposed that supports all the communication configurations specified in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such reported case of all functioning IEEE 802.15.6 RF channels. Moreover, a demonstration of an NB baseband processing module with the security scheme is set up to verify the performed evaluation platform. The demonstration results proved that the proposed SDR evaluation platform is functional, reliable, and provides the capability to build larger WBAN configurations with more complexity. In the future, more research attention will be invested in a few additional topics. First, more RF channel cases, such as UWB communication channel evaluation, will be performed exhaustively in the proposed evaluation platform for WBAN systems. Moreover, a more rigorous verification procedure to evaluate WBAN systems in the proposed evaluation platform will be investigated, so that different designs for the same functionality in WBAN, such as the conventional BCH decoder and high-performance BCH decoder, could have fair comparisons. Conceptualization, J.W. ; data curation, J.W. and K.H. ; formal analysis, J.W. and K.H. ; investigation, Y.P. and J.L. ; methodology, J.W., K.H., and A.A.; project administration, Y.P. and J.L. ; resources, Z.Z. ; software, Z.C. ; supervision, Z.Z. ; validation, K.H. and Z.C. ; writing, original draft, J.W. ; writing, review and editing, A.A.  
[PERSON] would like to thank the China Scholarship Council for supporting his Ph.D. program (CSC No. 201608880004). This work is partially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos.