A low-profile, wideband, circularly polarized, slotted, U-shaped textile antenna for W-BAN applications

Abstract

We propose a compact, wideband, U-shaped, circularly polarized textile antenna (UCPTA) resonating at 2.45 GHz for wireless body area network (W-BAN) applications. The radiator of the antenna is printed on the top of the substrate (size of (Formula presented.) mm3; (Formula presented.)) and has a full ground plane on the other side. The proposed antenna's substrate consists of a single layer of denim ((Formula presented.)), and conductive copper tape was used to fabricate the patch. The antenna has a low-profile design that is suitable for wearable applications. A small slot was introduced at the center of the U-shaped patch to enhance the 3 dB axial ratio bandwidth (ARBW) up to 55.17%. The proposed antenna radiates with a 10 dB return loss (RL), impedance bandwidth (IBW) of 64.40%, and a simulated gain of 5.1 dBi. The wearable textile antenna with broadside radiation response is appropriate for off-body communications. The prototype of UCPTA is fabricated for experimental validation. The measured results for the fabricated antenna were in good agreement with the simulated results. Further, it has been demonstrated that the antenna's performance is stable during structural deformation and human body loading. This textile antenna covers an ARBW in the frequency band of 2.1 GHz–3.72 GHz and has a broad IBW (2 GHz–3.9 GHz) for LTE (2.17 GHz), MBAN (2.360 GHz–2.4 GHz), WPAN (2.395 GHz–2.4 GHz), and WLAN (2.4 GHz–2.482 GHz) applications.