A Wearable PIFA With an All-Textile Metasurface for 5 GHz WBAN Applications

In this letter, a wearable all-textile metasurface antenna (MSA) for 5 GHz wireless body area network (WBAN) applications is proposed. All the components of the proposed MSA are made of the comfort textile materials. A metasurface with high permittivity values is placed right above a wide-bandwidth planar inverted-F antenna to realize size miniaturization and gain enhancement. The proposed MSA has a profile of 4 mm (0.07λ₀) and occupies an area of 42 mm × 28 mm (0.77λ₀ × 0.51λ₀). Moreover, this antenna realizes a measured peak gain of 6.70 dBi, an average efficiency of 77%, and an operating band from 4.96 to 5.90 GHz that covers the 5 GHz WBAN band. In addition, the on-body studies show that the MSA is suitable for wearable applications.