Antennas for on-body communication systems

Abstract

The optimum choice of antenna for on-body communications is discussed in this paper. Several different antennas, including the monopole, the loop and patch and patch arrays have been fabricated and tested in the on-body environment. In particular, path gain measurements of two on-body paths has been performed for a range of body postures. It is clear that the monopole antenna performs best in most of the measurement cases. A first order analysis of the path loss, consisting of antenna gain deduced from link geometry and a free space loss appropriate to the path distance, give results that are within 10 dB of measurements for most body postures.