Capacity of Broadband Body-to-Body Channels Between Firefighters Wearing Textile SIW Antennas

Reliable, high-data rate indoor communication is essential to transfer crucial information between firefighters for improving their safety and decreasing the number of casualties caused by indoor fires. Since electronic monitoring systems, including antennas implemented inside the firefighter jacket, should provide high data rates, communication over a wideband channel is required. We study an 80-MHz-wide body-to-body channel at 3.6 GHz between two firefighters of a Rapid Intervention Team (RIT) performing the primary search for victims, by static and dynamic channel sounder measurements. Two ultra-wideband (UWB) substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) cavity-backed slot textile antennas were unobtrusively deployed in the front and the back sections of the firefighters' jackets, providing up to 2 x 2 MIMO communication. We calculate the achievable single-input single-output (SISO)-, single-input multiple-output (SIMO)-, multiple-input single-output (MISO)-, and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) capacities for realistic indoor broadband body-to-body communication channels between two firefighters. Furthermore, we analyze implementations of one-dimensional (1-D) spatial waterfilling and two-dimensional (2-D) space-frequency waterfilling, studying their ability to further enhance transmission of live sensor data, pictures or videos between mobile firefighters.