The Influence of Textile Dielectric Properties in On-body Radio Communication Channel Performance at 2.45 GHz

This paper presents the characterization of on-body radio communication channel considering the effect of textile dielectric properties at 2.45 GHz. The experiment was performed in the anechoic chamber, involving six subjects that utilized a pair of omni-directional antenna, textile monopole. Four types of textiles clothing with different dielectric properties were considered in this investigation; cotton, nylon, satin and polyester. The transmitted antenna was positioned on a fixed location, right upper arm of the human body and the received antenna position was varied on seven realistic on-body locations for both line-of-sight (LOS) and nonline-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios. This investigation was carried out to determine whether the dielectric properties of textile clothing give significant effect on the characterization of on-body radio communication channel. The path loss model was determined for on-body radio communication channel for LOS and NLOS scenarios. The comparison of path loss values between with and without textile cases was also presented in this work. The result showed that the path loss variation for NLOS was higher than LOS scenario, up to 13.9% for all materials. The results also exhibits that path loss variation was more dependent on the dielectric properties as well as thickness of textile in LOS case compared to NLOS.