An Implementation of a Wireless Body Area Network for Ambulatory Health Monitoring

In the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), radio propagations from devices that are close to or inside the human body are complex and distinctive comparing to the other environments since the human body has a complex shape consisting of different tissues. Therefore, the channel models are different from the ones in the other environments. We present a literature survey on channel characterizations and modelling for WBAN. The interesting common result is that the propagation wave is diffracting around the human body rather than passing through it. The path loss is very high especially when the receive antenna is placed on the different side from the transmit antenna. The lognormal distribution turns to be the best fit for the small-scale fading rather than the traditional Rayleigh and Ricean distributions in the other environments. Moreover, the high correlation between delay bins is observed. In addition to the literature survey, we propose a procedure including the measurement campaigns and the channel characterizations to obtain the channel models with fulfilling what they are missing.