Pedestrian effects in indoor UWB off-body communication channels

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology offers a promising solution for future indoor high-speed, low-power wireless body centric communications. Development and design of such systems requires detailed understanding of the indoor off-body UWB channel, which to date has been scarcely investigated. This paper presents results for a series of controlled experiments that were aimed at developing a better understanding of pedestrian effects on UWB links in the indoor environment. Swept-frequency based measurements were carried out with a pedestrian interrupting the dominant line of sight path while following a pre-defined trajectory between a static transmitter antenna and bodyworn receiver antennas. Wideband path gain, peak shadow loss, and time delay parameters such as RMS delay spread and mean excess delay are presented. The results emphasize that off-body UWB channel-characteristics are affected by pedestrian-activity in the local environment.