Characterization of the Fat Channel for Intra-Body Communication at R-Band Frequencies
Noor Badariah Asan,
Emadeldeen Hassan,
Jacob Velander Syaiful Redzwan Mohd Shah,
Daniel Noreland,
Taco J. Blokhuis,
Eddie Wadbro,
Martin Berggren,
Thiemo Voigt,
Robin Augustine
Affiliations
Noor Badariah Asan
Microwaves in Medical Engineering Group, Solid State Electronics, Department of Engineering Sciences, Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 534, 751 21 Uppsala, Sweden
Emadeldeen Hassan
Department of Computing Science, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Jacob Velander Syaiful Redzwan Mohd Shah
Microwaves in Medical Engineering Group, Solid State Electronics, Department of Engineering Sciences, Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 534, 751 21 Uppsala, Sweden
Daniel Noreland
Department of Computing Science, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Taco J. Blokhuis
Department of Surgery, Maastricht University Medical Center, 6229 HX Maastricht, The Netherlands
Eddie Wadbro
Department of Computing Science, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Martin Berggren
Department of Computing Science, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Thiemo Voigt
Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, 752 36 Uppsala, Sweden
Robin Augustine
Microwaves in Medical Engineering Group, Solid State Electronics, Department of Engineering Sciences, Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 534, 751 21 Uppsala, Sweden
In this paper, we investigate the use of fat tissue as a communication channel between in-body, implanted devices at R-band frequencies (1.7–2.6 GHz). The proposed fat channel is based on an anatomical model of the human body. We propose a novel probe that is optimized to efficiently radiate the R-band frequencies into the fat tissue. We use our probe to evaluate the path loss of the fat channel by studying the channel transmission coefficient over the R-band frequencies. We conduct extensive simulation studies and validate our results by experimentation on phantom and ex-vivo porcine tissue, with good agreement between simulations and experiments. We demonstrate a performance comparison between the fat channel and similar waveguide structures. Our characterization of the fat channel reveals propagation path loss of ∼0.7 dB and ∼1.9 dB per cm for phantom and ex-vivo porcine tissue, respectively. These results demonstrate that fat tissue can be used as a communication channel for high data rate intra-body networks.
