A Subject-Specificity Analysis of Radio Channels in Wireless Body Area Networks

This paper presents an analysis of subject-specific radio channels in wireless body area networks (WBANs) using a simulation tool based on the parallel finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique. This technique is well suited to model radio propagations around complex, inhomogeneous objects such as the human body. The impacts of different subjects varying in size on on-body, inter-body, and off-body radio channels are studied. The analysis demonstrates that the characteristics of on-body radio channels are subject-specific and are associated with human gender, height, and body mass index. On the other hand, when waves propagate away from the body, such as in the inter-body and off-body cases, the impacts of different subjects on the channel characteristics are found to be negligible.