Influence of User Mobility and Antenna Placement on System Loss in B2B Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the influence of user mobility and on-body antenna placement on system loss in body-to-body communications in indoor and outdoor environments and different mobility scenarios is studied, based on system loss measurements at 2.45 GHz. The novelty of this work lies on the proposal of a classification model to characterise the effect of user mobility and path visibility on system loss, allowing to identify the best set of on-body antenna placements. To quantify the influence of visibility and mobility on the average system loss, a combined score is proposed, allowing to map system loss onto the degree of visibility and mobility that depends on the scenario being considered and on on-body antenna placements. Overall, a good agreement is observed between the proposed classification model and the average measured values of system loss, with the higher values of combined scores being associated with lower values of systems loss. For the cases under study, the average values of system loss are 61.6 dB for the cases of the antennas being positioned only on the front of the body and/or the head, and 64.5 dB if at least one of the antennas is placed on an arm.

Keywords

• Body Area Networks
• body-to-body
• user mobility
• on-body antenna
• path visibility
• system loss