This article is part of the series Towards the Connected Body: Advances in Body Communications.

Open Access Research Article

An Analytical Modeling of Polarized Time-Variant On-Body Propagation Channels with Dynamic Body Scattering

Lingfeng Liu1,2*, Farshad Keshmiri1, Christophe Craeye1, Philippe De Doncker2 and Claude Oestges1

Author Affiliations

1 ICTEAM Electrical Engineering, Université Catholique de Louvain, 3 Place du Levant, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

2 OPERA Department, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP 194/5, Avenue F. D. Roosevelt 50, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium

For all author emails, please log on.

EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2011, 2011:362521 doi:10.1155/2011/362521


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2011/1/362521


Received:5 October 2010
Accepted:13 January 2011
Published:19 January 2011

© 2011 Lingfeng Liu et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

On-body propagation is one of the dominant propagation mechanisms in wireless body area networks (WBANs). It is characterized by near-field body-coupling and strong body-scattering effects. The temporal and spatial properties of on-body channels are jointly affected by the antenna polarization, the body posture, and the body motion. Analysis on the time variant properties of on-body channels relies on a good understanding of the dynamic body scattering, which is highly dependent on specific scenarios. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to provide a canonical description of on-body channels in both time and space domains to investigate the on-body propagation over the trunk surface of a walking human. The scattering from the arms and the trunk in different dimensions is considered with a simplified geometrical description of the body and of the body movements during the walk. A general full-wave solution of a polarized point source with multiple cylinder scattering is derived and extended by considering time evolution. The model is finally validated by deterministic and statistical comparisons to different measurements in anechoic environments.

Publisher note

To access the full article, please see PDF.