Design of Octagonal Patch Antenna with Enhanced Gain for Wearable Applications

In a world of miniature handheld devices for communication and monitoring, designing a suitable antenna is a challenging task. The antenna designer has to take care of many factors while designing the antenna such as bandwidth and gain. If the antenna is intended for wearable applications, the evaluation of specific absorption rate (SAR) has to be considered. In this work, we propose a miniaturised octagonal microstrip patch antenna that operates at 2.5 GHz and covers the 2.45 GHz ISM band. The octagonal patch with each side measuring 7.46 mm is designed on 22×22×1.6 mm
³
FR4-epoxy substrate. The antenna is fed through inset feeding technique. The ground plane has been modified for achieving a high gain of 14 dB at 2.5 GHz. The front-to-back ratio was measured to be 26.86 dB. The SAR values was observed to be below the threshold limits making the antenna a very suitable candidate for on-body communication applications.