Research Article An Efficient Full-Wave Electromagnetic Analysis for Capacitive Body-Coupled Communication Muhammad Irfan Kazim, 1 Muhammad Imran Kazim, 2 and J. Jacob Wikner 1 1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Link¨ oping University, 581 83 Link¨ oping, Sweden 2 Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, Netherlands Correspondence should be addressed to Muhammad Irfan Kazim; irfan.kazim@isy.liu.se Received 16 February 2015; Revised 28 April 2015; Accepted 4 May 2015 Academic Editor: Lorenzo Crocco Copyright © 2015 Muhammad Irfan Kazim et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Measured propagation loss for capacitive body-coupled communication (BCC) channel (1 MHz to 60 MHz) is limitedly available in the literature for distances longer than 50cm. Tis is either because of experimental complexity to isolate the earth-ground or design complexity in realizing a reliable communication link to assess the performance limitations of capacitive BCC channel. Terefore, an alternate efcient full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulation approach is presented to realistically analyze capacitive BCC, that is, the interaction of capacitive coupler, the human body, and the environment all together. Te presented simulation approach is frst evaluated for numerical/human body variation uncertainties and then validated with measurement results from literature, followed by the analysis of capacitive BCC channel for twenty diferent scenarios. Te simulation results show that the vertical coupler confguration is less susceptible to physiological variations of underlying tissues compared to the horizontal coupler confguration. Te propagation loss is less for arm positions when they are not touching the torso region irrespective of the communication distance. Te propagation loss has also been explained for complex scenarios formed by the ground-plane and the material structures (metals or dielectrics) with the human body. Te estimated propagation loss has been used to investigate the link-budget requirement for designing capacitive BCC system in CMOS sub-micron technologies. 1. Introduction Capacitive body-coupled communication (BCC) is consid- ered an enabling short-range wireless technology for the interaction between humans and the smarter ambiance. Te useful frequency range falls between hundreds of kHz to tens of MHz [1]. Te capacitive BCC has an advantage over other wireless technologies like Bluetooth and Zig-bee in the con- text of personal area network (PAN) and internet-of-things (IOT) due to lower power consumption and confnement of radiated energy, thus requiring less allocation of special frequency bands for communication. However, the potential of capacitive BCC for the aforesaid applications could be fully utilized by understanding the realistic interaction of the capacitive coupler, the human body (electrophysiological properties of tissues), and the environment for diferent scenarios and communication distances. Although diferent chip solutions have been presented for capacitive BCC [2, 3], it is not clearly known for how many body positions and for which coupler confguration/sizes, communication distances, environment, and so forth the results have been reported. A limited literature about experimental measure- ments for the propagation characteristics of capacitive BCC channel is available, the limitation being the experimental setup, especially for distances longer than 50 cm. A number of factors which infuence BCC include large variations in the propagation characteristics with diferent body positions, coupler types and sizes, types of indoor fooring, furniture, and electronic equipment around us. Te other factors encompass the difculties in isolating the earth-grounded instruments during body measurements and design com- plexity involved in implementing reliable, battery-operated, high data-rate transceivers in the mid-frequency range of 1 MHz to 60 MHz for bit-error-rate (BER) measurements. An alternate approach is to rely on circuit based models [4, 5] or analytical [6] or numerical methods [7–11] to model Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Antennas and Propagation Volume 2015, Article ID 245621, 15 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/245621