Impacts of Human Body Shadowing in Wireless Body-Centric Communications

In wireless body-centric communications, either the transmitter or the receiver, or both are located in close proximity to the human body. Thus, the Line-of-Sight (LOS) components of the radio signal are particularly susceptible to shadowing caused by human body. In earlier, the effect of human body shadowing was studied using κ-μ fading channel, where the resultant dominant signal components due to body shadowing effect was characterized by log-normal distribution and Nakagami-m distribution in different experiments. In this context, this article provides a comprehensive comparison of two aforementioned methods of human body shadowing effects in wireless body-centric communications. Here, the dominant component characterized by log-normal distribution is mentioned as shadowed log-normal model, whereas the Nakagami-m distribution dominant component model is mentioned as shadowed Nakagami-m model. Different wireless body-centric communications scenarios, namely on-body, off-body, and body-tobody, are tested separately with these two distribution methods. MATLAB based simulations indicate that the shadowed Nakagami-m distribution provides better fit to the empirical results in comparison of shadowed log-normal distribution. Moreover, the probability density function of shadowed Nakagami-m model provides numerical advantages over shadowed log-normal model.