IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation Announces Special Issue on Antennas and Propagation for Body-Centric Wireless Communications

Body-centric wireless communications refer to human-self and human-to-human networking with the use of wearable and implantable wireless sensors. It is a subject area combining wireless body-area networks (WBANs), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). Body-centric wireless communications has abundant applications in personal healthcare, smart home, personal entertainment and identification systems, space exploration and military. The human body is an uninviting and often hostile environment for a wireless signal. In general, antennas suffer from reduced efficiency due to electromagnetic absorption in human tissues, radiation pattern fragmentation and variations in impedance at the feed. Typical geometries of wireless wearable and implantable devices, vary from millimetric-to-centimetric sizes and, hence, compact yet efficient antennas need to be fuilly characterized and integrated with the RIF transceiver. As well as size there are other significant challenges in the design of antennas for body-centric wireless communications. Some of these are conformability and immunity to frequency and polarization detuning. It is important to understand material properties of fabrics and potential use of microwave metamnaterials, to minimize the specific absorption rate (SAR). There is also the question of frequency band selection. Do you use one of the ISM bands or say any of the new ultra wideband (UWB) techniques? The objective of this Special Issue is to highlight current and emerging research in antennas and propagation for body-centric wireless communications, as well as applications of this technology. The Special Issue will bring together the latest work in this subject area. It will highlight recent research into how body-centric wireless networks (mainly in-body, on-body and off-body) should be implemented in a spectrally efficient manner without inconveniencing other radio users. Manuscripts should conform to the requirements for regular papers as specified in the information for Authors in the inside back cover of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Potential contributors may contact one of the three Guest Editors by email (with the contact information provided below) to determine the suitability of their contribution to the special issue. All invited and contributed papers must be submitted on line through the AP Transactions Manuscript Central web site (http:lltapieee.manuscriptcentral.com), with a statement to the Editor-in-Chief of the AP Transactions, Dr Trevor S. Bird, that they are intended for this special issue.