Bit and rate allocation in body-to-body channels

Targeting the two conflicting objectives of the safety of the human being against electromagnetic exposure and the high data rate communication, in this paper, the power and rate resource allocations are addressed in the case of body area networks (BANs). The performance in terms of spectral efficiency of the on-body and body-to-body channels are compared when the power and rate resources are allocated to each eigen-channel of the multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) body channels under average transmit and bit-error rate (BER) constraints. It is shown that, due to the presence of a lower LOS component, the belt-head on-body channel yields the highest spectral efficiency compared to the other body-channels. The best-chest on-body and the belt-head body-to-body channels experience a penalty in terms of the achievable spectral efficiency performance due to the high channel correlation.