Research on Human Body Communication Channel Characteristics

Abstract

Human body communication (HBC) is a communication technology that uses the body of a person as a channel to propagate signals. Many characteristics of HBC present advantages over the most common radiation-based methods, which makes it an interesting alternative to implement the emergent body area networks. The characterization of the HBC channel presented in the literature still cannot provide a good and complete explanation for the channel behavior. Aiming at the problem, in this work, we present our attempt to characterize the signal in the HBC channel, and on the basis of the capacitive coupling, the model of HBC transceiver and prototype is designed. The relationship between the rate and bit error rate and the factors that affect the HBC channel such as transmission distance, electrode material, etc. based on the capacitive coupling are studied and simulated. The experiment results show that under the guarantee of high quality communication, the data rate of prototype can be up to 400 kbps. The channel has a feature of band-pass response, and the transmission distance and electrode materials have a non-negligible influence in the channel profile in the middle and high frequency range.