Characterization of the fat channel for intra-body communication at R-Band frequencies

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the use of fat tissue as a communication channel between in-body, implanted devices at R-band frequencies (1.7-2.6 GHz). The proposed fat channel is based on an anatomical model of the human body. We propose a novel probe that is optimized to efficiently radiate the R-band frequencies into the fat tissue. We use our probe to evaluate the path loss of the fat channel by studying the channel transmission coefficient over the R-band frequencies. We conduct extensive simulation studies and validate our results by experimentation on phantom and ex-vivo porcine tissue, with good agreement between simulations and experiments. We demonstrate a performance comparison between the fat channel and similar waveguide structures. Our characterization of the fat channel reveals propagation path loss of ~0.7 dB and ~1.9 dB per cm for phantom and ex-vivo porcine tissue, respectively. These results demonstrate that fat tissue can be used as a communication channel for high data rate intra-body networks.