Experimental Evaluation of MIMO Capacity and Correlation for Narrowband Body-Centric Wireless Channels

Using multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver has shown a remarkable scope for capacity increase for indoor wireless mobile and PAN communications and is here extended to on-body channels. The capacity and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel correlation analysis has been performed at 2.45 GHz frequency using planar Inverted-F antennas (PIFA) for three on-body channels. The improvement offered by 2 x 2 MIMO over the conventional single-input single-output link for the on-body channels has been discussed. The variation of capacity with Rician K-factor is shown and the MIMO channel spatial correlation matrices are presented. The effect of correlation on the channel capacity is discussed.