Design and Performance Analysis of Reconfigurable Antenna in WBAN Applications

The paper proposes the design of a reconfigurable antenna and its implementation for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)applications Reconfigurable antennas reconfigure to reverberate multiple frequencies to provide support to a variety of functions. Such antennas provide remarkable benefits, such as liability and compact design. Properties such as polarization, radiation pattern, and frequency are altered in such antennas as per changing ecological conditions or fluctuating system requirements in a restricted manner and hence is best suited for usage in WBAN applications. A reconfigurable microstrip patch antenna operating at two frequencies is designed in this paper. The concept of switching the lumping element i.e pin diode between ON and OFF state, to save the energy and reduce power consumption is introduced in antenna. The proposed antenna incorporates advantages like the multifunctional operation of the microstrip patch antenna and symmetry of radiation pattern on reconfiguring it at the two frequencies in ONN and OFF state. The performance of the antenna is assessed based on S11 and the gain of the antenna for ISM and UWB in ON and OFF state. The desired resonant frequency in ON state is 2.45GHz (ISM band) achieved with a return loss of -20dB and for OFF state is at 4.8GHz, which lies in the safe Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) range and is achieved with a return loss of 14dB. The gain obtained in ON state is 5.203dB and in OFF state is 3.679dB.