An investigation on the surface wave characteristics at 2.4 and 60 GHz for on-body communications

Over the past few years, body-centric wireless communication systems have attracted significant interest from both the academic and industrial community. The availability of low-cost miniaturized electronic components has led to the rapid growth of WBAN in various applications. In healthcare, BANs can provide cost-effective solutions for monitoring chronically ill patients, or non-invasive alternatives to traditional diagnosing techniques such as blood-glucose monitoring for diabetic subjects. The commercial electronics market has also been very responsive to demands from the field of sports and fitness. To sustain this enormous growth of wearable industry, it is necessary to develop reliable and efficient systems working at various frequency spectrums. Accurate knowledge of the communication channel in the vicinity of the human body will be an essential prerequisite in this regard. A wide amount of groundwork has already been carried out in terms of measurement and simulation for analyzing the channel characteristics up to 10 GHz. It is observed that creeping waves significantly influence the on-body communication channels, especially in the shadowed regions. However, characterization of such wave components at V band is by no means a trivial task. The objective of this work is to perform comparative investigation on the on-body channel characteristics at narrow band and V Band regions of microwave spectrum.