A Wideband Wearable Antenna with AMC Ground Plane for WBAN Applications

Abstract

A flexible wearable antenna with wideband characteristics and having a conical radiation pattern which is suitable for ON body application is presented. To realize a compact antenna size, characteristic modal (CM) analysis is performed initially, and the ground plane of the antenna is utilized to generate one of the resonant modes. The quasi-current loop in the feed layer patch is used to generate another resonant mode. Combination of these two modes has resulted in the wideband performance of the antenna from 4.72 to 6.08 GHz. A planar wideband artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) is used beneath the antenna. This AMC surface compensates the undesired coupling taking place due to the ground radiator thereby reducing the specific absorption rate (SAR) to 76.4% and enhancing the gain of the antenna. The performance of the antenna in terms of return loss, gain, efficiency, SAR and bending sensitivity is studied.