Fading Analysis for BANs in Cylindrical Rooms with Metallic Walls

A fast fading analysis for Body Area Networks operating at 2.45 GHz in cylindrical rooms with metallic walls is presented in the paper. A model was developed, based on geometrical ray bouncing. By using an empirically validated simulator, it is shown that it is enough to analyse up to 2nd order reflections. Additionally, it is shown that the normalised radius (to the wavelength) of the cylindrical room does not have a significant influence on fast fading characteristics. The obtained values for the Rice factor, being negative or very close to 0 dB, show that in this kind of environments fast fading can be characterised by the Rayleigh Distribution.