Design of a Miniaturized High-Isolation Diversity Antenna for Wearable WBAN Applications

Abstract

This paper proposes a miniaturized high-isolation diversity antenna for wearable wireless body area network (WBAN) applications. An inverted-F type radiating element is used to reduce the overall dimension of the proposed antenna to <TEX>$30mm{\times}30mm{\times}2.5mm$</TEX>. The antenna performance on the human body phantom is analyzed through simulation and the performance of the fabricated antenna is verified by comparing the measured data with that of the simulation when the antenna is placed on a semi-solid flat phantom with equivalent electrical properties of a human body. The fabricated antenna has a 10 dB return loss bandwidth over the Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) band from 2.35 GHz to 2.71 GHz and isolation is higher than 28 dB at 2.45 GHz. The measured peak gain of antenna elements # 1 and # 2 is -0.43 dBi and -0.54 dBi, respectively. Performance parameters are analyzed, including envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), mean effective gain (MEG), and the MEG ratio. In addition, the specific absorption ratio (SAR) distributions of the proposed antenna are measured for consideration in use.