Fidelity Pattern Analysis of a CPW-Fed Miniature UWB Antenna Using Different Excitation Pulses

Abstract

This letter presents numerical and experimental investigations of the fidelity factor of a novel coplanar waveguide (CPW)-fed miniature tapered-slot antenna. Different excitation pulse types have been employed to study the effect of the antenna and the propagation channel on the received pulse quality. The antenna is intended to be used in a pulse-based time-of-flight motion tracking system, which requires minimum distortion to the received pulse for the accurate retrieval of the sent data. A distinguishing aspect about this study is that the fidelity analysis has been carried out both in free-space and with the antenna mounted on the human body considering an extended spatial range compared to previously reported work. The results show that the miniature ultrawideband (UWB) antenna offers a very limited pulse distortion. Excellent average fidelity value of over 0.95 has been obtained by employing appropriate input pulses, even when the antenna is mounted on the human body. Furthermore, the effect of fidelity on communication performance of an ultrawideband antenna system has been studied by modeling an impulse-based UWB system. It has been demonstrated that the high pulse fidelity of the antenna leads to consistent bit error rate (BER) values in various spatial directions.