Modeling of Propagation on and Interaction between Body-mounted Antennas

Recently, there has been a growing interest in body area networks (BANs), which play an important role in body-centric wireless communications. The ability to model and simulate these networks is crucial to their design-as a complement to measurements that are essential but quite tedious and time-consuming in nature. The objective of this paper is to focus on the problems of ultrawideband UWB antenna design and propagation modeling, using a versatile computational EM (CEM) solver GEMS. A brute-force approach to the simulation of this complex problem is very time-consuming, if not prohibitive, because the number of DoFs (degrees of freedom) can reach 10E+9, or even higher. The GEMS code, which is based on the finite difference time domain (FDTD) algorithm, has been designed to run on a highly-parallel platform, enabling it to handle large and multi-scale problems in an efficient manner. The presentation will include illustrative numerical results for the propagation and coupling problems, and will discuss some designs for wideband antennas that make them useful for the application at hand, because of their conformal nature and desirable radiation characteristics.