Investigation of channel spatial diversity for dual-link cooperative communications in WBAN

In this work, we investigate the spatial diversity gain offered by on-body channels in indoor environments. Narrowband on-body channel measurements are conducted in a dual-link topology, to cover various scenarios with different link geometries and body movements. Cooperative dual-link communications with equal-power allocation scheme are evaluated based on the channel measurements. The simulated bit-error-rate (BER) of the cooperative dual-link is compared with the single-link performance. The results highlight the performance of the cooperative scheme for uncorrelated channels with significant fading variance and close pathloss level. In such cases, spatial diversity effectively improves the quality and BER of on-body communications.