Wide-band Dual Port Cross Slot Wearable Antenna for In-body Communications

Wearable antennas are commonly required for devices that operate within the Body Area Network. Depending on the application, the wearable antenna might be forming an off-body, on-body, or in-body link. Forming an in-body link is often more challenging due to reflection at the air-human body boundary and the path loss within the body. The performance of the antenna is going to be dependent on where it is located on the human body as the effective permittivity changes according to the dominant tissue. In order to improve the reliability or the data rate of the in-body link, multiple polarization and wide-band operation can be utilized. Here, a wide-band dual port wearable antenna is presented. The input bandwidth of the antenna is 1.52 GHz operating from 0.94 GHz to 2.36 GHz, a fractional bandwidth of 87%, on any tissue having a relative permittivity of 30 or more. The isolation between its ports is shown to be greater than 40 dB throughout the bandwidth.