Analysis of the channel power delay profile of WBAN scenarios in various indoor environments

The Wireless Body Area Networks technology is a promising candidate for various potential applications in the domains of health, monitoring, sport, etc. The optimization of WBANs at the system level requires an accurate knowledge of the propagation channel which plays a key role on the design of the other layers. The explosive combinatory due to the numerous sources of variability and the diversity of the situations should be reduced to be reasonably analyzed. One way is to try to separate the "on-body" cluster from the "off-body" clusters due to MPCs coming from the surrounding environment. This allows to analyze separately the proper sources of variability (population, postures and movements, antennas, etc.) from the exogenous influence of the environment, reducing considerably the required experimental effort and simplifying the modeling process. It is proposed here to separate the "fine structure" of the Power Delay Profile in three contributions: the "on-body cluster", a "transition region" dominated by "off-body MPCs" and the superposition of the diffuse scattering tail and possible residual long range coherent clusters. The RMS delay spread statistics is also analyzed, as well as its correlation to the PL.