On-body evaluation of UWB receiver position for wireless body area network

In a wireless body area network, the position of the sensor nodes are fixed, while the receiver position can be changed. In this paper, we evaluate three popular receiver positions based on the bit error rate obtained from ultra wideband (UWB) based sensor nodes and a UWB receiver hardware. The three receiver positions evaluated are waist, chest and arm. It is shown that by selecting the optimum receiver position, it is possible to transmit up to 20 dB less power, while maintaining the required bit error rate of 10^-3. Evaluation of different combination of sensor nodes shows that chest position is preferred location for the receiver.