Characterization of Wireless On-Body Channel Under Specific Action Scenarios at Sub-GHz Bands

Body area network is an emerging area of wireless communication for medical healthcare applications. This paper characterizes the narrowband wireless on-body channels under specific action scenarios by measurement at the three different sub-GHz frequencies of 444.5, 611, and 953 MHz, which are the candidate frequency bands of narrowband body area network systems with low data rates in IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The channel responses at ten different antenna positions were measured in an office room environment for the two dynamic action scenarios of “walking on the spot” (Action I) and “standing up/sitting down” (Action II). This paper provides generalized on-body channel models of Nakagami- $m$ and Weibull distributions for Actions I and II, respectively. Notably, this paper shows that the shadowing effect due to body movement is dominant over the multipath fading. The results were obtained by the statistical analyses of channel fading properties at three different frequencies including level crossing rate, average fade duration and channel dwelling time.