2.4 GHz Wearable Textile Antenna/Rectenna for Simultaneous Information and Power Transfer

Antennas and rectennas for self-powered body area networks (BANs) have attracted significant interest, in an effort to improve the sustainability of e-textiles. This paper presents a novel dual-port fully-textile antenna, based on a simple microstrip patch, for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) at 2.4 GHz, presenting the first antenna-rectifier co-design implementation for SWIPT. The proposed antenna’s input bandwidth covers the license-free band achieving 8.9 dBi measured directivity and 41% efficiency at 2.4 GHz, with a simple proximity-coupled microstrip feed. For power harvesting, port 2 is designed to achieve a scalable complex impedance to directly match the rectifier without a separate matching network, and achieves 6.3 dBi off-body gain. The proposed rectenna feed improves the antenna’s isolation by at least 15 dB compared to a microstrip feed similar to port 1. The rectenna achieves over 40% power conversion efficiency (PCE) from −10 dBm, when placed directly on-body, with a 71% peak PCE.