Statistical Modeling of the Human Body as an Extended Antenna

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel discrete point source scatterer model to jointly represent human bodies and antennas as extended objects, enabling better understanding of scattering effects in ultrawideband channels.

Contribution

It introduces the extended antenna concept and demonstrates the model's ability to capture human body and antenna scattering effects using real measurements.

Findings

Human body causes significant shadowing and scattering effects.

The model can distinguish between antenna alone and with human proximity.

Ultrawideband measurements validate the model's effectiveness.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the possibility of modeling a single antenna alone and in close proximity to a physical object by means of discrete point source scatterers. The scatter point model allows joint modeling of a physical antenna and the human body as a single extended object with direction dependent scattering coefficients for the scatter points. We introduce the term extended antenna describing antenna and human body together. To investigate the identifiability of the model parameters we make use of ultrawideband channel measurements and accurate ground truth position and orientation measurements obtained with an optical tracking system. By comparing measurements of the antenna attached directly to the user with measurements for the antenna without the user nearby, we show the shadowing and scattering effects of the human body and the antenna.