Body centric wireless networking and communications is an emerging 4G technology for short (1-5 m) and very short (below 1 m) range communications systems, used to connect devices worn on (or in) the body, or between two people in close proximity. It has great potential for applications in healthcare delivery, entertainment, surveillance, and emergency services. This book brings together contributions from a multidisciplinary team of researchers in the field of wireless and mobile communications, signal processing and medical measurements to present the underlying theory, implementation challenges and applications of this exciting new technology. Topics covered include: diversity and cooperative communications in body area networks; ultra wideband radio channel characterisation for body-centric wireless communication; sparse characterisation of body-centric radio channels; antenna / human body interactions in the 60 GHz band; antennas for ingestible capsule telemetry; in vivo wireless channel modelling; diversity and MIMO for efficient front-end design of body-centric wireless communications devices; on-body antennas and radio channels for GPS applications; textile substrate integrated waveguide technology for the next-generation wearable microwave systems; ultra wideband body-centric networks for localisation and motion capture application; down scaling to the nano-scale in body-centric nano-networks; and the road ahead for body-centric wireless communication and networks.

Adaptive modulation and diversity combining represent very important adaptive solutions for future generations of wireless communication systems. Indeed, to improve the performance and the efficiency of these systems, these two techniques recently have been used jointly in new schemes named joint adaptive modulation and diversity combining (JAMDC) schemes. Considering the problem of finding lowcomplexity, bandwidth-efficient, and processing-power efficient transmission schemes for a downlink scenario and capitalizing on some of these recently proposed JAMDC schemes, we propose and analyze three fully joint adaptive modulation, diversity combining, and power control (FJAMDC) schemes. More specifically, the modulation constellation size, the number of combined diversity paths, and the needed power level are determined jointly to achieve the highest spectral efficiency with the lowest possible combining complexity, given the fading channel conditions and the required bit error rate (BER) performance. The performance of these three FJAMDC schemes is analyzed in terms of their spectral efficiency, processing power consumption, and error- rate performance.