Feasibility Study of Joint Modeling of Environmental and Morphological Effects for WBAN

In this article, we assess the feasibility of the joint modeling of the effects of the environment and morphology in the context of the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) for the scenario based approach in the 1 st Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) sub-band [3.1, 4.8] GHz. Previous works have enabled to obtain important representative statistical samples for these two variables, to our knowledge not reached to date for WBAN communications, with a dedicated methodology combining simulations results and experimental designs supported by measurements. Our approach is to combine these variables in a disjointed manner in order to extract a more complete model and naturally limit the simulations campaigns to a reference subject for all the environments to be considered. Thus, for a given subject we therefore estimate the propagation channel transfer function from its on-body contribution and that of the environment obtained with the reference subject. This feasibility study is the first step in extracting interesting future models and a huge saving of time. The comparison results obtained between the estimated transfer function and the nominally calculated one highlight fairly small differences in the majority of cases, which is encouraging for the use of this simplifying approach.