UWB Channel Measurements for Measures for Hand-Portable and Wearable Devices

On-body UWB signal propagation is analyzed for propagation channels surrounding the body in an usual office environment for an application requiring the transmission of signals recorded from the head to a device such as a mobile phone or a PDA carried by the subject or also from the transmitter on the head to other devices located along the body. For the study, measurements of the frequency response by means of a VNA (Vector Network Analyzer) are performed at 2001 discrete frequency points in the 3 to 6 GHz range. Channel estimation parameters, such as mean excess delay, delay spread and path loss are obtained. Results show that for the transmitter located on top of the head best average performance is achieved facilitating the receiver design. Energy can also be captured from multi- path reflections in the office environment providing better performance when using adaptive receivers.