A comparison of human body compensation models for RSSI based localization and tracking

This preliminary work presents a comparative study of human body compensation models for localization and tracking purposes. Besides the well known influence of multipath fading and diffraction on the performance of localization systems, the influence of the user itself is often still neglected. The presence of such a user can block the radio-frequency (RF) signal paths between a body-worn node and the fixed infrastructure nodes. As a result, these additional obstructions might worsen the performance. This phenomenon is also known as human body shadowing and to cope with this effect, human body compensation models are used. In this work, compensation models obtained through electromagnetic (EM) simulations and empirical measurements are evaluated and compared.