Study of propagation along the body at 60 GHz with analytical models and skin-equivalent phantoms

Propagation on the surface of the human body is investigated for the first time in the mm-wave frequency range. The study, motivated by the increasing number of applications of body area networks, is performed through an accurate analytical model for the fields excited by a small source in the proximity of the human body. New asymptotic expressions are derived for the fields, uniformly valid for the range of values of the physical and geometrical parameters of interest. The theoretical analysis leads to the rigorous estimation of important parameters of the communication link. Moreover, an experimental setup is built in order to validate the approach and to obtain further physical insight into aspects not modeled by the theoretical analysis.