Diversity and MIMO for body-centric wireless communication channels

Due to its increasing applications in personal communications systems, body-centric wireless communications has become a major field of interest for researchers. Fading and interference are the two concerns that affect the reliability and quality of service of wireless links. Diversity has been used to overcome these two problems. This thesis looks into the use of receive diversity for on-body channels. Space, pattern, and polarization diversity performance is analyzed and quantified by actual measurements in real environments. Significant diversity gains of up to 10 dB are achieved for most of the on-body channels. The on-body diversity channels have also been characterized by performing the statistical and spectral analyses. The fast fading envelope best fits the Rician distribution, with moderate K-factor values, and the slow fading envelope best fits the Log-normal distribution. Diversity has been found effective in the BAN-BAN interference rejection and significant rejection gain values are achieved. A new algorithm for BAN-BAN interference rejection has been proposed and compared with the conventional adaptive algorithms. The use of multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver end, i.e., MIMO has been investigated for on-body applications. It has been noticed that MIMO provides significant capacity increase for these channels despite the line-of-sight.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

d_ph

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

d_ph

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Birmingham

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Khan, Imdad

• TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/433/2/Decl_IS_Khan09PhD.jpg

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etheses.bham.ac.uk:433