Off-body wireless link simulation framework using deterministic channel modeling

Body-centric communication concerns wireless links in which the human body represents the central element, exchanging data by means of wearable antennas with a different node in the external environment or on the human body itself. During the link design phase, it is very advantageous to be able to model the link and predict its performance before its real implementation, resulting in reduction of design time and costs. In the present contribution, we propose a novel computer simulation framework to describe a complete off-body communication link between a human user and a remote base station, including all the components of the communication link such as wearable and fixed antennas, human body and propagation channel at the physical level, also taking into account the digital data transmission at link level. The proposed framework was constructed by applying the most appropriate modeling tools for each component, including ray tracing for the deterministic channel modeling. The framework provides as output the most common link performance parameters such as Bit-Error-Rate (BER), received Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and channel correlations. The validity of the proposed method was verified by comparing the figures of merit of a real off-body communication link, studied during a previous measurement campaign, with the ones obtained by the proposed simulation framework. A good agreement is obtained in terms of both BERs and SNRs.