Enabling Offline Tuning of Fat Channel Communication

ABSTRACTThough fat channel communication has advantages over earlier intra-body communication (IBC) technologies based on galvanic or capacitive coupling, the development of a protocol stack on top of fat channel communication is still at its infancy. In this paper, we consider Krentz's denial-of-sleep-resilient multi-channel medium access control (MAC) layer for IEEE 802.15.4 networks as a starting point for such a protocol stack. In brief, we conducted the following experiment with a phantom that mimics human tissues. Two devices exchanged IEEE 802.15.4 radio frames in a ping-pong manner on the phantom's fat tissue using Krentz's MAC layer. The data collected from this experiment lends itself to two purposes. First, it can serve to benchmark and tune algorithms for selecting radio channels. Second, it can also serve to benchmark and tune schemes for deriving cryptographic keys from received signal strength indicator (RSSI) readings. We made the data available at https://uppsala.box.com/s/z2a6jpigswpoifd5l73yophokcfwd88b.