Propagation Characteristics of Intra-body Communications for Body Area Networks

Body area networks (BAN) will become increasingly important in the future personal communication systems. We believe that intra-body communications (IBC) based on near field electromagnetic waves is a suitable solution for BAN. This paper presents experimental measurements of the frequency and time domain responses in order to investigate the transmission characteristics of the human body as a conductor of low power high frequency radio signals (up to 3GHz). In the measurements, several distances between transmitter and receiver (up to a long distance from the head to the foot) and six test people (to study the possible variation results due to physiological body effects) have been considered. Besides analyzing the intra-body channel response, we also aim to define a suitable frequency range for IBC. Finally, this paper also presents an initial evaluation study of several digital modulation schemes in order to investigate the optimal technique for IBC.