Analysis of the separability of the “on-body” cluster and the “off-body” clusters in the modeling of the UWB WBAN channels for various indoor scenarios

The Wireless Body Area Networks technology is widely recognized as a promising candidate for various potential applications in the domains of health, surveillance, monitoring, sport, multimedia, entertainment, data transfer, etc. A central research topic in WBAN system optimization lies in getting an accurate knowledge of the propagation channel which plays a key role on the design of the PHY, MAC and Network layers. The explosive combinatory due to the numerous sources of variability and the diversity of the situations should be reduced to be reasonably analyzed. One way is to try to separate the “on-body” cluster (analyzable in an anechoic chamber) from the “off-body” clusters due to MPCs coming from the surrounding environment. This allows to analyze separately the proper sources of variability (population - gender, corpulence, size, age -, postures and movements, antennas - classes, distance from the body and polarization -, “micro-positioning” on the body, etc.) from the exogenous influence of the environment (type and size of rooms), reducing considerably the required experimental effort and simplifying the modeling process.