Studies of planar antennas with different radiator shapes for ultra-wideband body-centric wireless communications

This paper studies the performances of planar UWB monopole antennas using a radiator of different shapes including triangle, rectangle, square, annual ring, circle, vertical ellipse, ellipse, pentagon and hexagon for body-centric wireless communications. The planar antennas consist of a radiator and a microstrip-feed line on one side of the substrate and a ground plane on the other side. Results of simulation studies show that the antenna using an elliptical radiator appears to have a better overall performance in terms of bandwidth, gain, efficiency and radiation pattern, among the antennas studied. The antenna achieves a wide impedance bandwidth of 3.1-12 GHz, an average peak gain of nearly 3.5 dBi and good radiation patterns, making it a good candidate for UWB body-centric wireless communications.link_to_OA_fulltex