On-body skin confined propagation for Body Area Networks (BAN)

The augmenting need for remote monitoring and treating patients by biophysical sensors interconnected via Body Area Networks (BAN) has recently called researchers' attention. The private and confidential transferred data in such application require high information security. One of the solutions is to use human body as a transmission channel. The body surface-confined transmission restricts the off-body detection, increasing the system security. Also, it reduces the interference between BAN users. For better understanding the body channel propagation mechanism, a lossy multilayered human body model, made of skin, fat, muscle tissues, is established for numeric analysis in this paper, using complex frequency dependent dielectric property for each tissue. Transverse Resonance Method is applied to calculate dispersion and attenuation in the propagation direction up to 60GHz. Since the tissue thickness varies with different localization and different person, 3 skin thicknesses, typically 0.5 mm, 1 mm, and 1.5 mm, are considered and compared.