A 5-tissue-layer lumped-element based HBC circuit model compatible to IEEE802.15.6

Human body communication (HBC) has significant advantage over wireless communication schemes in wireless body area networks (WBANs) in terms of power efficiency due to the high conductivity of human body. An accurate circuit model for transmission channel is necessary for optimizing the HBC transceiver performance. Conventional models achieve limited accuracy because of incomplete body tissue model or the use of tranmission-line at circuit level. In this paper, we proposed a comprehensive HBC circuit model which is based on 5 human-surface tissue layers representing the physiological characteristics of living tissues and the frequency dependence of their dielectric properties. Instead of using transmission-line, our model is based on lumped-element analysis, which is more accurate at the 21 MHz frequency band specified by the IEEE 802.15.6 HBC standard. We verified the proposed model by actual measurement on human body at various of communication distances. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieved the minimum error among all the modeling works, i.e., 1.80% minimum error and 2.24% maximal error at various communication distances.