Impact of the human walking motion on BAN diversity effects

This paper presents analytical results on the BER degradation of QPSK signals for BAN diversity antennas for the case where the combined outcome of shadowing and multipath fading emerge simultaneously and statistical model of human walking motion is employed in the analysis. The results show that a probability of a low signal level is higher than that for the Rayleigh distribution owing to shadowing caused by the movement of the arms, resulting in the significant impact on the BER performance of body-attached BAN devices. The antenna separation greater than 80 deg. is required for reducing the shadowing effects.