The influence of the wearable antenna type on the on-body channel modeling at 2.45 GHz

This paper discusses the impact of the antenna type on the on-body channel modeling, based on a systematic measurement campaign at 2.45 GHz. Two different microstrip antennas were used for the measurements, a coaxial fed rectangular patch antenna, that shields the human body from back radiation and a coplanar patch antenna, which radiates towards the human body. An extensive statistical analysis was performed and the empirical CDFs were compared to eight well-known fading distributions. Among the distributions tested only lognormal, gamma and α-μ models provided best fit to the data. It was observed that the channel modeling depends on the antenna type used. Moreover, deviations of up to 3.5 dB were reported between the envelope CDFs of the two antennas.