An experimental evaluation of spatial diversity for body-to-body communications within an urban environment at 2.45 GHz

In this paper, we investigate the potential improvement in signal reliability for body-to-body communications using spatial diversity. The measurements were made at 2.45 GHz in an urban environment with uncontrolled pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The virtual array of four distributed receive antennas were situated on the central chest and waist and the left wrist and waist of the user´s body. The correlation coefficient between the signal fading measured at each of these locations was generally less than 0.7. Selection, maximal ratio, and equal gain combining of the received signal has shown that a diversity gains of up to 6.1 dB can be achieved when using only two distributed antennas and a maximal ratio combining scheme.