A subject-specific numerical study in UWB body-centric wireless communications

Ultra wide-band (UWB) is an appealing technology for wireless body area networks (WBANs). The paper presents the numerical analysis of the subject-specificity of the radio channel in UWB-WBANs adopting the finite difference time domain technique. The analysis has been performed in the frequency range 3–10 GHz considering nine homogeneous digital phantoms of different size and gender. A two-pole Debye model was used to model the frequency dispersion of the human body muscle tissues, and the results demonstrate that the received power in on-body links is subject-specific and associated with the body mass index of the subject.