Multiple antenna systems for increasing on-body channel capacity and reducing BAN-to-BAN interference

The application of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) in body-area networks (BAN) is considered in the paper. The correlations between MIMO sub-channels and the MIMO channel capacity are investigated for three on-body channels when random movements are performed in an indoor environment. Some of the MIMO sub-channels were found to be correlated. Nevertheless, a significant capacity increase due to use of MIMO was still observed thus demonstrating the feasibility of using MIMO in BAN communications. A simple BAN-to-BAN interference rejection method which makes use of interrupted transmission is also proposed in the paper, and is shown to produce interference rejection gains significantly higher than those produced by two conventional interference rejection methods.