Dynamic Off-Body Rician Channel Modeling for Indoor Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless off-body channel is commonly treated as a traditional communication system assuming large and small scale fading to be independent. In this work, we challenge this approach and experimentally show that in a typical WBAN environment of a single room, this assumption is not accurate. We propose an off-body channel model where path loss and multipath fading are entirely determined by Rician distribution and linked through a stochastic Rician factor K. Treating K as a random variable, whose density is determined by the scenario under consideration, allows our model to naturally address different types of body motion along with correlated shadowing. By means of simulation supported by experiments, we show that our model is able to accurately describe probability densities of instantaneous received power in various static and dynamic settings. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can predict the off-body diversity gains due to correlated antenna reception when selection combining scheme is applied.