Modeling Human Body Influence in UWB Channels

This paper proposes a channel model for ultra-wideband (UWB) off-body radio signals considering the human body in close proximity to a radio transceiver as an extended object (EO). The EO representing the human body adds scattered signal paths to the multipath components commonly encountered in indoor environments and accounts for attenuation of specular components by the human body. The purpose of this work is to describe the impact of such multipath effects, in order to develop robust algorithms for ranging and positioning in these environments. For a qualitative validation, we compare synthetically generated channel realizations based on our proposed off-body channel model with off-body measurements acquired in an indoor environment. To evaluate the human body effects on UWB range estimation, we compare the results obtained with a maximum likelihood (ML) multipath parameter estimator applied to channel measurements with synthetically generated channel realization, showing good correspondence.