Shadowing effect of upper limbs in body-centric communication at W band

Body-centric wireless communications continue to raise the interest of the research community, and the major electronics companies now have a line of wearable devices. Applications are becoming more and more complex, requiring high data rate and robust, reliable communication links. The portion of the frequency spectrum currently being considered for Body Area Networks (BAN), which goes up to 10 GHz, is however already significantly overcrowded, as it includes widespread applications such as mobile phone communications and wireless LAN. Therefore the use of millimeter wave frequencies is being investigated: particularly the bands around 60 GHz and 90 GHz seem promising, since they have been released for unlicensed use by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and may easily provide data rates higher than 1 Gb/s (J. Wells, IEEE Microw. Mag., Vol. 10, Issue 3, pp. 104-112, 2009).