Off-Body Antenna Wireless Performance Evaluation in a Residential Environment

Modern body-centric communication systems require good link quality. Antenna performance is of primary importance when meeting this requirement. This paper contributes a method suited to the difficult task of quantifying antenna performance in a body-centric communications system. In a case study, a planar wrist wearable antenna, which provides radiation pattern switching across the 2.4 GHz operating band through an innovative technique that does not require an additional switching mechanism, is benchmarked against a monopole and a patch antenna in a residential setting. The performance of the antenna and subsequently the benefits of the pattern-switching technique are successfully quantified. The holistic method includes both antenna measurements and channel simulation with ray tracing. Results are verified against real-world measurements.