Bandwidth scaling of fading properties of on-body wireless channel in Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (BANs) present an exciting opportunity for further growth in wireless connectivity. In this paper, an investigation on how the fading properties for wireless BAN on-body channels scale with bandwidth is made, thereby filling the unexplored gap between fading in narrowband and extremely wideband channels. The fading is found to scale similarly to indoor channels, but the dominance of the first path means that the wideband channel properties are achieved already for bandwidths in excess of 100 MHz. Furthermore, fading in footwear centric and in waist centric system is compared. It is concluded that the footwear centric architecture has similar fading properties for all bandwidths and for all nodes except for the node on the back, where it significantly outperforms the waist centric system.