Characterisation of body-shadowing effects in the indoor environment at 5.2 GHz

Human body shadowing effects can considerably influence the channel characteristics of indoor radio communication systems. In this work, body-shadowing effects were measured for a line-of-sight (LOS) point-to-point 5.2 GHz link with up to 3 pedestrians moving within a 42 m² room. The results show that received power values are significantly dependent on whether or not the user´s body obstructed the direct ray to the transmitter. Under obstructed conditions, the measured body shadowing effect was an attenuation of up to 10 dB. The first order statistics for the experimental scenarios tend to be Rice distributed with the K factor decreasing as the number of pedestrians present increased.