Material Property Based Analysis of Human Body Communication in Body Resonance Regime

Optimizing the battery life for the miniaturized wearable devices, residing around the human body has been one of the cardinal aspects that drive the research for an energy-efficient communication medium in a Wireless-Body Area Network (WBAN). Wearable devices, communicating via radio frequency (RF)-based techniques incur higher losses and suffer from security vulnerabilities owing to their radiative nature. Since its emergence, Human Body Communication (HBC) has shown great promise by providing an energy-efficient and physically secure mode for information exchange among the wearable devices in the Electro-Quasistatics (EQS) frequency regime, which has been broadly explored. Besides, three regions in the body-channel characteristics namely EQS, Body Resonance (BR), and Device Resonance (DR), over a wide range of frequencies (100kHz-1GHz), have been conceptualized. With its high channel gain (CG) and bandwidth (BW), the BRHBC can potentially exhilarate high data rate body-centric communications with wearable devices. However, the HBC channel in the BR regime that contributes to its high CG and BW demands an analysis of the influence of the body-tissue properties on the channel characteristics. This paper, for the first time, studies the effect of the electrical properties of the human body as a communication medium in the BR regime. Finite Element Method (FEM) based electromagnetic (EM) simulations and wearable-to-wearable (W-W) measurements are performed to study the channel variability with the electrical properties of the communication medium during its interaction with electromagnetic fields. Results are analyzed to develop an understanding of the EM-wave propagation in the vicinity of biological materials for biomedical applications.