Abstract
The reliability of on-body communications is a major requirement for many applications. This paper introduces a novel method to enable effective on-body communications, making use of several on-body antennas to create a virtual MIMO system. Strategies for the selection of the best wearable antenna placements based on appropriated metrics, with examples for a 2 × 2 MIMO system, are given. The model includes a statistical description of the antenna-user coupling, the channel variability due to body dynamics, as well as the scattered propagation environment. The channel model assumes that the received signal results from the contribution of one on-body component and of several environment multipath ones. The comparison in system performance between a street and inside an office shows that multipath in large environments is negligible compared to the on-body component (at the selected frequency of 2.45 GHz). The best performance is obtained when the sink (receiver) nodes are on the front and back of the body, and data sensors (transmitters) are on the head, with a relative capacity gain over SISO of roughly 2.
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Oliveira, C., Correia, L.M. MIMO Capacity for On-Body Communications in Scattered Environments. Wireless Pers Commun 83, 2999–3016 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2578-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-015-2578-9