A flexible polymer substrate based wideband antenna for WBAN applications

A compact and broadband wearable antenna is presented in this paper. The coplanar waveguide (CPW) feed antenna is composed of a modified rectangle patch with truncated top and bevelled bottom corners which operates from 3.2 to 14 GHz frequency band. The proposed antenna is employed on flexible Liquid Crystal Polymer (LCP) substrate and has a compact dimension of 37.91×28.39×0.88 mm
³
. The fractional bandwidth of the antenna is about 125.58% by taking -10dB reflection coefficient into consideration. The performance of the antenna under structural deformation, humid condition and on-body placement are also evaluated. The wideband operation, compact size, resilient to frequency de-tuning in on-body configuration with low specific absorption rate make the proposed antenna suitable for the wireless body area network (WBAN) applications.