A Compact Wearable 2.45 GHz Antenna for WBAN Applications

In this paper, a compact flexible and wearable meandered structure microstrip patch antenna to resonate at 2.45 GHz frequency (ISM band) has been proposed. The proposed antenna substrate is designed using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate with a dielectric constant of 2.71, loss tangent of 0.0134 and thickness of 1mm. The silicone polymer is highly flexible and well suited for wearable applications. The overall size of the proposed flexible antenna is 33×30×1 mm
³
. The parameters such as gain, return loss, directivity, VSWR, radiation efficiency and the surface current distribution of the designed antenna are analyzed and validated using finite element method based Ansys HFSS (High Frequency Simulator Software) software. The simulation results show that the antenna has a gain of 1.9 dB, -26.82 dB return loss, 100 MHz bandwidth (2.4 GHz - 2.5 GHz) based on |S
₁₁
| ≤ -10 dB, a directivity of 2.1 and 92% radiation efficiency. The compact size and high flexibility of the proposed antenna makes it suitable for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications.