Indoor off-body communications at 5.8 GHz with multiple antennas at the base station: A statistical characterization using the Nakagami-m fading model

In this paper we investigate the first and second order characteristics of the received signal at the output of hypothetical selection, equal gain and maximal ratio combiners which utilize spatially separated antennas at the base station. Considering a range of human body movements, we model the model the small-scale fading characteristics of the signal using diversity specific analytical equations which take into account the number of available signal branches at the receiver. It is shown that these equations provide an excellent fit to the measured channel data. Furthermore, for many hypothetical diversity receiver configurations, the Nakagami-m parameter was found to be close to 1.