Full mesh channel measurements on Body Area Networks under walking scenarios

Abstract : Body Area Networks (BANs) exhibit a unique form of channel variations and traditional propagation models fail to adequately match the behavior of BAN communication links. We present here the results of a measurement campaign whose primary objective was to characterize the complete mesh of a BAN and simultaneous analyze the quality of every radio link between the different nodes. We performed several measurement campaigns with indoor and outdoor walking scenarios. The data harvested allows us to highlight symmetry issues in the communications, and we prove that it is due in part to hardware variations in the sensors. Furthermore, the simultaneous measurements of the link quality allows us to extract the correlation in their temporal evolution. We show that scenario-based link correlation matrices cannot be considered, but their evolution over time is stable enough to consider that practical protocols may estimate them with sufficient precision.