Performance Analysis of a Wearable and Dual Band Planar Antenna Using a Mushroom-like Electromagentic Bandgap (EBG) Ground Plane

In this paper a dual band (2.4 GHz and 5.4 GHz) microstrip patch antenna is designed and compared using a conventional and artificial ground planes for Wi-Fi and WLAN applications. In the design of both antennas a wearable wash cotton substrate having relative permittivity, thickness and loss tangent of 1.51, 3 mm and 0.025 respectively, has been used. Since the proposed antenna is dual band, therefore a dual band artificial ground plane (mushroom-like) has been designed using a square slot in the conventional single band artificial ground plane. The conventional antenna offers an adequate wider bandwidth (308.8 MHz) at 5.4 GHz which is further enhanced using the EBG ground plane (363 MHz). Efficiency of the proposed patch antenna with and without artificial ground plane is slightly higher than 60% at both the lower and upper resonant bands. A trivial improvement of 1.25 dBi in the directivity of the proposed antenna is achieved at 5.4 GHz. This improvement can be enhanced by optimizing the EBG surface for surface wave suppression. The gain of the conventional antenna is enhanced from 5.55 dB to 6.92 dB at 2.4 GHz and 6.17 dB to 7.25 dB at 5.4 GHz using the EBG ground plane. Antenna presented in this paper can be used in off-body communications as well as wearable electronics. CST MWS has been used to analyze the antennas and EBGs.