Fading of the transmission channel between two wireless body area networks in an office at 2.45 GHz and 5.8 GHz

Transmission channel between two body-worn terminals at 2.45 GHz and 5.8 GHz has been investigated. A series of data sets have been gathered in an office and anechoic environment for random realistic activities and several body orientations, and have been subjected to statistical analysis. The short-term and long-term fading components of the path gain envelope were separated and fitted to a number of distributions using maximum likelihood estimated parameters and chi-square test. The short-term fading envelope was found to follow a Rician distribution, and the long-term fading was best described by a gamma distribution if the distance remained constant and a lognormal distribution otherwise. The statistics of the path gain and their dependence on the distance, antenna positions, and frequency are also presented.