Abstract:
In recent years, great emphasis has been lead on research and development of
body-centric communication. The technology is important to support remote
medical diagnosis and health monitoring, especially for elderly or people with
chronic health issues. An important element of body-centric communication system is the central node, usually a wearable antenna. Ultra-Wide Band (UWB)
is emerging as a favourable technology for wearable applications due to its low
power consumption but high data rate. The UWB based circuits have the ad vantage of being easily fabricated into Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits
(MMIC). The key challenging element of UWB WBAN is the antenna element, as
not only the wearable antenna has to be compact in size but it also needs to cover
a wide band along with satisfactory radiation properties. Moreover, the UWB
system has to face potential interference from WLAN IEEE 802.11a, HIPER LAN/2 band, downlink of X-band satellite and ITU services. This thesis focuses
on a compact UWB structure design and analysis. A planar patch antenna with
slots for the purpose of band notches to ovoid interference has been proposed. The
UWB antenna is integrated with an Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) layer to
enhance its parameters, overall producing a low profile and cost effective antenna.
Detailed design evolution from the basic UWB antenna to optimized multilayered
UWB structure has been investigated. One of the major contributions of the work
lies in its conformance with Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Spe cific Absorption Rate (SAR) limit and avoidance of interference with overlapping
bands to confirm its suitability in wearable system. An insight on the performance
of the structure through simulations and practical characterization has been made.
The performance of the fabricated structure is compared with simulated results to
assess the performance and confirm stability
