Channel Characterization of Walking Passerby's Effects on 2.48-GHz Wireless Body Area Network

A statistical analysis of walking passerby's effects on narrowband wireless body area network (WBAN) in outdoor and indoor environments at 2.48 GHz is presented. Experiments were conducted to measure the dynamic channel responses of various on-body links with four sets of pre-defined passerby movements while the user remains stationary in a standing posture. On-body links that experienced fades greater than 20 dB from the static path gain were identified. The effects of passerby movement types, in both outdoor and indoor environments, were analyzed and compared to the effects of user's motions such as walking and running. Parameters for the Ricean distribution, which was found to be a good fit for channel gain variation, are presented to model the channel up to the second-order statistics, such as level crossing rate and average fade duration. The parameters allow the use of fading channel simulators to reproduce the passerby's effects in the on-body channels.