Diversity performance of UWB low band communication over in-body to on-body propagation channel

Ultra wideband (UWB) technology in low band is promising for implant body area network. In this paper, the performance improvement of an in-body to on-body UWB communication, which corresponds to a capsule endoscope application, is investigated. We firstly analyzed the in-body to on-body propagation characteristics and proposed a two-path impulse response channel model based on finite difference time domain numerical method (FDTD) incorporated with an anatomical human model. In view of the extracted statistical characteristics of the proposed two-path model, we then employed a spatial diversity reception technique to improve the communication performance effectively. The average bit error performance was finally investigated to clarify the diversity effect with theoretical analysis and computer simulation.