Characterization of the Body-to-Body Propagation Channel for Subjects during Sports Activities

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 18; no. 2; p. 620
• Main Authors: Mohamed, Marshed, Cheffena, Michael, Moldsvor, Arild
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 18.02.2018; MDPI
• Subjects: body area networks; body-to-body communication; performance analysis; personal communication networks; radio propagation; Simulation; time-varying channels; Wireless networks; body area networks; personal communication networks; body-to-body communication; radio propagation; performance analysis; time-varying channels
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s18020620

Body-to-body wireless networks (BBWNs) have great potential to find applications in team sports activities among others. However, successful design of such systems requires great understanding of the communication channel as the movement of the body components causes time-varying shadowing and fading effects. In this study, we present results of the measurement campaign of BBWN during running and cycling activities. Among others, the results indicated the presence of good and bad states with each state following a specific distribution for the considered propagation scenarios. This motivated the development of two-state semi-Markov model, for simulation of the communication channels. The simulation model was validated using the available measurement data in terms of first and second order statistics and have shown good agreement. The first order statistics obtained from the simulation model as well as the measured results were then used to analyze the performance of the BBWNs channels under running and cycling activities in terms of capacity and outage probability. Cycling channels showed better performance than running, having higher channel capacity and lower outage probability, regardless of the speed of the subjects involved in the measurement campaign.