Dual Band Textile Monopole Antenna with AMC Plane for WLAN and UWB Applications

Abstract

A flexible monopole antenna fabricated fully using textile is presented in this work. It operates in the 5 GHz Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)–Ultra Wideband (UWB) mandatory channel 6 centered at 8 GHz based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. To alleviate backward radiation that exists in monopole antennas, it is integrated with an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) plane. The unit cell of this AMC is designed based on a rectangular patch inserted with incisions. The unit cell operated from 6.78 GHz to 8.77 GHz. Upon forming the AMC plane with a 3 x 3 array, its integration with the ring-slotted monopole antenna resulted in its improvement of the in terms of impedance matching and gain at 5.5 GHz WLAN (lower) band and at 8 GHz WBAN-UWB (upper) band. Measurements corresponded well with simulations, producing 490 MHz and 1710 MHz of bandwidth in the lower and upper band, respectively.