Nano-Antenna Directivity for Electromagnetic Propagation in WBANs

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nano-antenna directivity influences electromagnetic wave propagation in the human body for WBANs, highlighting its minor impact on path loss compared to distance and frequency effects.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of nano-antenna directivity effects on EM wave propagation within biological tissues, an area with limited prior focus.

Findings

Nano-antenna directivity contributes 5-7 dB to path loss.

Path loss varies significantly with distance and frequency.

Simulation results quantify the impact of directivity on in-vivo EM communication.

Abstract

In-vivo sensing, diagnosis and treatment of diseases is having a great attention lately. With advanced computational systems, the processing of the biological data as well as the prediction of diagnosis is becoming more promising. However, the implementation of these systems inside the human body has a major challenge; modeling the communication channel. To overcome this problem, researchers are investigating the main factors that define the characteristics of the communication channel between nano-devices. In this work, we summarize the elements that contribute to the path loss encountered by an EM wave traveling in water, skin or epidermis. Then, the impact of nano-antenna directivity on the EM propagating wave is studied along with the frequency and the communication distance. The simulation results show that the nano-antenna directivity seems to have minor contributions 5 to 7 dB on the total path loss inside the human body with respect to the distance 2 to 30 dB and frequency 10 to 15 dB.