On the separability of “on-body” and “off-body” clusters in the modeling of UWB WBAN channels for various indoor scenarios

The Wireless Body Area Networks technology is a promising candidate for various potential applications in the domains of health, monitoring, sport, multimedia, entertainment, data transfer, etc. The optimization of WBANs at the system level requires an accurate knowledge of the propagation channel which plays a key role on the design of the PHY, MAC and Network layers. The explosive combinatory due to the numerous sources of variability and the diversity of the situations should be reduced to be reasonably analyzed. One way is to try to separate the “on-body” cluster from the “off-body” clusters due to MPCs coming from the surrounding environment. This allows to analyze separately the proper sources of variability (population - gender, corpulence, size, age -, postures and movements, antennas - classes, distance from the body and polarization -, “micro-positioning” on the body, etc.) from the exogenous influence of the environment, reducing considerably the required experimental effort and simplifying the modeling process.