Small-scale fading characteristics of diversity combining schemes used for body-to-body communications within an urban environment at 2.45 GHz

In this paper, an analysis of spatial diversity and small-scale fading characteristics for body-to-body communications is presented. The measurements were made at 2.45 GHz in an urban environment with uncontrolled pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The virtual array of four distributed receive antennas where situated on the central chest, central waist, left waist and left wrist of the user's body. Combining of the received signal measured at each of the antennas in the virtual array has shown that an average diversity gain of up to 11.8 dB can be achieved when using four distributed antennas and a maximal ratio combining scheme. To model the small-scale fading characteristics obtained at the output of the virtual combiners, we use diversity specific, theoretical probability density functions for multi-branch receivers operating in Nakagami-m fading channels. It is shown that these equations provide an excellent fit to the measured channel data.