An ultra‐thin flexible four port MIMO antenna for WBAN communications

Abstract

This letter reports the design of a quasi Yagi‐Uda Antenna developed on an ultra‐thin flexible material for wireless body area networks (WBAN). The proposed planar Yagi‐Uda antenna operates at 2.45 GHz ISM band for medical applications. The microstrip line to slot line transition with circular geometry is used to obtain the necessary impedance matching. The proposed antenna has a footprint of 42 × 36 mm with a profile height of 0.05 mm. The quasi Yagi‐Uda antenna with a set of two directors exhibits 5% bandwidth with a unidirectional radiation pattern and a peak gain of 4 dBi. A four‐port multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) antenna is later developed to meet the diversity requirements of body‐centric communications. To improve the front‐to‐back ratio and specific absorption rate, the MIMO antenna is backed by a metallic reflector. The on‐body performance of the antenna are studied and the results are presented. The estimated envelope correlation coefficient is less than 0.4, apparent diversity gain is greater than 8 dB and effective diversity gain is above 7.2 dB for the proposed four‐element MIMO antenna. The prototype antenna is fabricated and the results indicate that the proposed antenna is suitable for WBAN communications.

Conformal eight‐port dual band antenna with switchable radiation pattern for 5G enabled on‐body wireless communications

“…The reported antenna has the smallest footprint compared to Musa and colleagues 5,7,9,10,13,14 leading to a miniaturized solution. The percentage miniaturization realized by the proposed antenna compared to Musa and colleagues 5,7,9,10,13,14 are 20%, 46%, 87%, 19%, 48%, and 55%, respectively. 3.…”

Wireless Body Area Networks and Their Applications—A Review

“…The WBAN applications become more common in healthcare, sports, military, space, and industrial applications, and therefore it becomes essential to develop flexible antennas facilitating the undisturbed use of these networks by the end users. Researchers have addressed this requirement from many different angles and have come up with different solutions [80], [81], [82], [83], [84], [85], [86], [87], [88], [89], [90], [91], [92], [93].…”

“…This antenna also showed that the resonance frequencies were slightly lowered when bent along either x-axis or y-axis, but still within the WBAN bandwidth for transmitting and receiving. Ramanujam and Perumalsamy reported a quasi Yagi-Uda antenna developed on flexible polyimide substrate operates at 2.45 GHz [85]. The designed antenna has dimensions of 42 × 36 mm and the thickness is 50 µm.…”

Optimum design of planar quasi‐Yagi antenna for wearable Internet of Things (IoT) applications

“…[13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Due to brevity, the discussions on those antennas are not included here. However, the research reported in Hasni and colleagues [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] signifies the importance of the chosen research domain and the challenges involved in meeting the technological requirements. In this paper, a metaheuristic algorithm named spider-monkey optimization is used in conjunction with the numerical solver CST microwave studio to design the dual-band wearable antenna targeted for IoT applications in the 2.45 and 3.4 GHz electromagnetic spectrum.…”

“…Some of interesting developments in wearable antennas have been demonstrated in Hasni and colleagues. [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] Due to brevity, the discussions on those antennas are not included here. However, the research reported in Hasni and colleagues [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] signifies the importance of the chosen research domain and the challenges involved in meeting the technological requirements.…”