Small-Scale Transmission Statistics of UWB Signals for Body Area Communications

Due to a wide range of potential applications, on-body communication has attracted a lot of interests from the industry. As a good understanding on the equivalent transmission model for signal transmitting around human body might be important to optimize a body area network, in this paper, we perform measurement and investigate on the small-scale statistics of the transmission channels when UWB technology is used. With the transmitter fixed on the right waist and the receiver placed across 5 different positions on the human body, the frequency channels (3-6 GHz) on three individuals of different build are measured and analyzed. It is found that lognormal distribution fits very well to the small-scale fading statistics of the channel at each location. Our measurement results show that the parameter mu of the lognormal distribution differs across receiver locations. However, for a particular receiver location, they are nearly the same for all the people under experiment. The parameter mu of the lognormal distribution was found to fluctuate with a standard deviation sigma_std.dev about a mean value sigma_average, for each receiver location.