Diversity antenna techniques for enhanced ultra wideband body-centric communications

This paper presents experimental investigations and analysis of ultra wideband (UWB) antenna diversity techniques for off-body radio propagation channels. Diversity gain (DG) is calculated for five different off to on-body radio channels for various locations in an indoor environment. Higher values of DG are obtained for non line-of-sight scenarios due to highly uncorrelated branch signals and low power imbalance. Results demonstrate that neither the small variations of diversity antenna on the body nor the subject location variations in an indoor environment will affect the diversity performance severely. Results obtained in this paper are compared with UWB on-body diversity and almost 50% improvement in DG is obtained for off-body cases, which shows significance of adapting diversity techniques for off-body radio channels in enhancing the performance of body-centric wireless communications.