An Optimization of a Circular Antenna Array for On-Body Communication

A non-uniform circular array wrapped around the waist is proposed for on-body communication with uniform on-body coverage at 5 GHz. To investigate the feasibility of such an array, we determined the path loss between such an array and on-body nodes using simulations and measurements on a cylindrical phantom and a real person. The number of array elements is varied to establish that uniform on-body coverage can be achieved. The best combination of array elements on a real person in terms of uniform on-body coverage is found with 4 elements distributed along the array, i.e., they were not found on one side of the body. A higher number of elements leads to a higher potential on-body gain, but also to a decrease in uniformity of the on-body coverage. These results are important for emerging WBAN applications that require uniform coverage of a large number of nodes spread over the human body.