System Modeling and Analysis of the 802.15.

4
Physical Layer Design
JIk0ng 7I0", 0n Lhcn, XIng I, XInh00 Zh0u
Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, China
` Email: xiajikang@ime.ac.cn
Abs r1c
Physical layer structure usually is frst considered to
design a standad SoC in wireless sensor networks, while
few practical works ca be referenced. This paper
presents detailed fnctional system modeling which
obeys IEEE 802.15.4 protocol and performance analysis
of three physical layer bands. Emphatically, the system
includes a novel algorithm of de-spreading with
minimum hamming distance and an implementation of
half-sine pulse shaping flters. According to the
simulation results, eror control coding like BCH is
recommended to use to enhace the data accuracy, ad
the low complexity flters can efectively improve the
system perforance. The contibution of this paper is
providing valuable reference for the frther design on
wireless sensor network baseband chips.
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IEEE 802.15.4[1] is a well-known standad developed
for low cost, low data rate, low power consumption, and
short-range radio fequency (R) trasmissions in a
wireless personal aea network (WPAN). In the past
couple of years it has become a popular protocol for
wireless sensor networks (WSN). Typical applications
are vaious including remote medical care, home/ofce
intelligence, modem militar, etc.
Several studies of WSN protocols were built on
network simulators, such as NS, OPNET or OMNET [2]
[3]. However, to our best knowledge, tere are few
complete and practical model-based evaluations and
analysis for te physical (PHY) layer. The authors of
[4][5] just build the most common models in Simulink
without considering the half-sine pulse shaping flter,
PHY packet format and error control coding. Our goal is
to establish a multi-pupose wireless sensor network
application system as the frst step of an efcient
baseband SoC design. Baseband chip is the core of the
entire node for signal acquisition, transmission and
processing, thus we present a detailed PHY architecture
by providing fnctional modeling and performance
analysis. The simulations are used to test the feasibility
and validity of this system architecture.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section
978-1-01284-193-9/11/$20.00 2011 LLL
2 provides a brief description of the physical layer
design. Section 3 presents the implementation of the
modules in the system. The simulation and analysis are
described in Section 4. Section 5 gives the summar.
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We focus on the physical layer of WSN SoC (system
on chip) node design, while the efects of the Medium
Access Control (MAC) layer will be tackled in the fture.
The main fnctions of the physical layer are spreading,
de-spreading, modulation and demodulation, pulse
shaping and de-pulse shaping of the signal. At the
physical layer, the devices operate in the ISM (Industrial,
Scientifc, and Medical) bands within three diferent
fequency ranges. In the digital baseband part, the chip
sequences use direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS)
to represent each data ad the ofset quadrature
phase-shif keying (O-QPSK) with half-sine pulse
shaping to be modulated onto te caier. In te 868/915
MHz band instead, the DSSS chip sequences are
modulated onto the caier by bina phase-shif keying
(BPSK) with raised cosine pulse shaping, and
diferential encoding is used for data symbol encoding.
The general system structure of the physical layer
bands is shown in Figure 1. The data fom Information
Souce ae expressed as the PPDU (PHY Protocol Data
Unit) packet in fxed format. Then, all bina data
contained in the PHY PDU shall be encoded using the
spreading, modulation ad pulse shaping fnctions.
Through the noisy chanel, the received data using the
inverse transformation method is compared with the
original one at the Error Rate Calculator. Since most
WSN nodes working under the hash environment, it is
necessary to add the Eror Contol Coding in this system
for transmission accuracy and reliability. The detail
modeling description is presented in Section 3.
Figure 1. The general system structure
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According to the structure, we build the system
model and D the simulation in Simulink. By using the
pre-installed interal built-in module blocks, we build
the OQPSK Modulator and De-Modulator, additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, Error Rate
Calculator, Eror Control Encoder and Decoder of the
2.4 GHz model. The Error Contol Coding can either be
BCH EncoderlDecoder, or Convolutional Encoder and
Viterbi Decoder. Other blocks including PPDU packet,
spreading, pulse shaping flters are customized designed
for this system separately. At the end of this section, we
introduce the method of building 868/915 Mz band
system model based on the forenamed model.
(1) Inforation source ad PRY PDU Receiver
The forat of PPDU is shown in the Table 1[1]. Te
synchronization header (SH), PHY header (PHR) ad
payload are packed to form the PPDU using the block of
Vector Concatenate. The PHY payloads are radomly
generated integers. In the PHY PDU Receiver te PHY
payloads are divided fom the package and displayed.
(2) Spreader and De-Spreader
The direct sequence spread spectru communication
system extends the usefl information to a ver wide
band by means of pseudo-random sequences, in order to
gain strong anti-interference and high security. In the
spreader, the lookup table block which stores the list of
the symbol to chip mapping is substantial. And in the
de-spreader, the chip to symbol mapping is decoded by
the method of minimum hamming distance defmed as a
embedded MATLAB fnction. The Fig. 2 describes the
fow vividly. Firstly, the 32-bit-chip stream is singly
compared with the relevant chip sequences fom 0 to 15
by XOR operation, and then the chip to symbol
de-spreading block outputs the matching symbol which
has smallest hamming distance. The experiments prove
this method by checking the fault-tolerant and eror
corection capability. For lower complexity, setting a
threshold of te hamming distance can be valuable, as it
can reduce the number of 32-bit XOR operations. Te
other mappings ae done by the block of Integer to Bit
Converter and Bit to Integer Converter.
(3) Pulse Shaping and De-Pulse Shaping Filters
The digital basebad shaping flter can efectively
suppress the inter-symbol interference (lSI), increase
data rates, and reduce trasmission distortion. According
to the protocol, that the chip rate is 2.0 Mchip/s
predicates Tc is 0.5Js. The chip sequences representing
Octets: 4
Preamble
SH
Table 1 Forat of the PPDU
1
SFD
1
Frame length
I
Reserved
(7 bits) (1 bit)
PH
variable
PSDU
payload
each data symbol ae modulated onto the carier using
O-QPSK with half-sine pulse shaping. Even-indexed
chips are modulated onto the in-phase (I) carier, while
odd-indexed chips are modulated onto the quadrature
-phase (Q) carier. Te half-sine pulse shape used to
represent each baseband chip is defmed by Equation (1):

t
= {
sin(
1
2

c
),0
=t=2T
c
(1)
0, ot|eise
In the Half-sine Pulse Shaping Transmit Filter, the
output signal is switched between positive and negative
discrete half-sine wave with upsampling based on te
value of chip sequences. In the receiver, an optimized
low-order lowpass flter is designed to impair the
channel noise on the effective signal and a Rate
Transition block is used for downsampling. Trading off
the performance and complexity, we choose 10 as the
sampling factor and 30 as the De-Pulse Shaping flter's
order afer a nuber of experiments.
The raised-cosine flter is also a low-pass flter
commonly used for pulse-shaping in digital modulation.
To select the customized flter scheme, we compare the
perforance of the two shaping flters in the same
system model. From the Figure 3, the half-sine pulse
shaping flters is mostly better than the raised cosine
flters with lO-upsampling and 10 I-order which are
provided by Matlab/ Simulink.
(4) 868/915 Mz band system model
The model of the physical layer in te 868/915 Mz
band is similar to the 2.4G one except a few
modifcations. The code we used in the embedded
MATLAB spreader/de-spreader fnction change to only
two value of I5-chip pseudo-random noise (PN)
sequence in bit-to-chip mapping afer diferential
encoding. Te OQPSK modulator and demodulator are
replaced by the BPSK modulator ad demodulator. Te
half-sine pulse shaping flters are also replaced by the
raised cosine pulse shaping flters.
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The 2.4GHz bad model is shown in Figure 4.
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{
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'v

}
0

0
0,!,',1\ ^' _ . . .

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_
Figue 2. The fow of de-spreading with minimum
hamming distance
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1 _____ _____
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_____
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____- _____ _____
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-----r----- ---

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z t
...........!.......... ... .......
----- -----, -----, -----

--- .

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-----, -----
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-----, ----- -----
,
-----
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1c

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Figure 3 Comparison of Half-sine pulse shaping
flters and Raised cosine shaping flters BER versus SNR
under AWGN
Simulations are perfored to study te bit error rate
(BER) versus signal to noise ratio (SNR) of te desiged
models of various parameters. The frst simulation case
runs on the 2. 4 GHz model band to investigate the efect
of vaing the input signal power in te AWGN channel.
The data rate is fxed at 250kbps, while the input signal
power is varied as 0.1, 0.2, 0.5 ad 1 Watts. The results
are shown in Figure 5. It shows that at the same SNR,
the higher the input signal power, te higher the
probability of error. The reason is that input signal power
is the actual power of the samples at the AWGN input.
According to the Matlab Equation(2), changing the input
signal power afects the vaiance of te noise added per
sample, which causes a change in the fnal eror rate.
(_r):nk
P0l8crlucc= I/
.
_//_
,
10
Z
(2)
Where: P is input signal power, Tsy is the symbol
period, Tsap is the inherited sample time.
The second simulation case runs on the 868/915
Mz model band to investigate the efect of varying the
input signal power in the AWGN channel. The data rate
is fxed at 20/40 kbps, while the input signal power is
Figure 4. Simulink model
0
u
m
P=c.1w
P=c.w
P=c.w
P=1w
1c
1 1c 1
6NR
Figure 5. BER versus SNR for diferent input signal
power values in the 2. 4 GHz band
varied as 0.1, 0.2, 0.5 ad 1 Watts. The results are shown
in Figure 6. It is similar to the results in the 2.4 GHz
band that at the same SNR, the higher the input signal
power, te higher the probability of eror. When the SNR
exceeds 5dB, the BER tends to be zero.
The third simulation case runs on the 2. 4 GHz model
band to investigate the efect of varing eror control
coding. The input signal power on the AWGN channel is
1 watts and the data rate is 250 kbps. Te results are
shown in Figure 7. The performances of BCH and
convolutional coding behave almost. When the SNR
exceeds -5dB, the BER of the communication system
with eror control coding is better tha the original one.
Considering te restriction of the hadware complexity,
BCH coding is easier to decode than convolutional
coding. So in the actual noisy chanel, it is necessar to
introduce the eror control coding like BCH.
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w
O
:c
1 1 : : c
SNR
Figure 6. BER versus SNR for diferent input signal
power values in the 868/915 Mz band
0
W
<
| |

...............................
------ ------ ------ ------ ------

a a
SNR
Figure 7. Performances for diferent error control coding
According to [4] and this work, we make comparison
between them, in the case of 2.4GHz band and 0.168
watts. In Figure 8, Our physical layer model is superior
to the model in [4], since introduction of the algorithm of
de-spreading and the half-sine pulse shaping flters.
Finally, we summarize the above simulation results
and compare them with the theoretical value of the
protocol. In Figure 9, solid line represents the theoretical
value; dotted line represents te actual simulation results.
In te 868/915 Mz bad, the curvilinear trend of the
actual value and the theoretical value calculated using
Equation (3) [1] is almost consistent.
D1K U.3Y
-11.25SNR
(3)
In the 2.4 GHz bad, there are diferences between
the simulation results without any error contol coding
ad the theoretical value calculated using Equation (4)
[1]. By using the eror control coding like BCH, the BER
of systems ca be better tha the theoretical value.
8 1 ,
!b (
:wu(',,
(4)
D = -? -? -1
,
15 16 ,, k
When SNR6dB, te BER<4.81 `10-
5
It meets the
receiver sensitivity defnitions[I](PER<I%, when PSDU
is 20 octets) ad the transmission requirements of WSN.
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Figure 8. Comparison of performance evaluation

SNR
Figure 9. Comparison of theoretical and simulation BER
versus SNR in three physical layer bads
5. 5umm1
In this paper, we present a detailed IEEE 802.15.4
protocol PRY design by providing fnctional modeling
and perforance analysis. And we focus on the scheme
of de-spreading and pulse shaping flters. Afer a series
of bit-by-bit simulations, the results show te design
confors to the protocol, ad optimizations are efective.
The half-sine pulse shaping flters with low complexity
improve the BER in the system, and eror contol coding
like BCH is propositional to be employed in the design.
This paper will provide valuable reference for the frther
design on WSN baseband chips.
Rcfcrcnccs
[1] IEEE, IEEE standard 802.15.4-2006, Par 15.4:
Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and
Physical Layer (PHY) Specifcations for Low-Rate
Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs), 2006.
[2] I. E Akyildiz, W Su, Y Saarasubramaniam and E.
Cayirci, "Wireless sensor networks: a survey",
Computer Networks, vol. 38, Issue4, p.393 (2002).
[3] N. Golmie, D. Cypher and . Rebala, "Performance
analysis of low rate wireless technologies for medical
applications", Computer Communications, vol. 28,
Issue 10, p.1266 (2005).
[4] Khaled Shuaib, Maam Alnuaimi, Mohamed
Boulmalf, Imad Jawhar, Faag Sallabi and
Abderahmane Lakas, "Performance Evaluation of
IEEE 802.15.4: Experimental and Simulation
Results", Joual of Communications, p.29 (2007).
[5] AI-Khateeb Anwa and Luciano Lavagno, "Simulink
Modeling of the 802.15.4 Physical Layer for
Model-Based Design of Wireless Sensor Networks",
2009 Tird Interational Conference on Sensor
Technologies and Applications, p.38 (2009).