Textile-based wideband flexible wearable dielectric resonator antennas for WLAN-band

Abstract

Flexible wideband dielectric resonator antennas (DRA) are designed using textile materials for wearable application at the wireless local area network (WLAN) band. The antennas are designed with different possible feeding technique e.g. coaxial probe feeding, and the aperture coupled method when feed transmission line is embroidered using conductive thread. Before using textile materials in antenna design, the material parameters are extracted using resonance technique, which are validated with measurements. A solid ground (GND) plane is replaced with shielded fabric GND plane, for more flexibility. To counter the fabrication problems, a fabric (with dielectric constant close to air) covering the DRA and holding it to its accurate position, will be stitched around at the upper layer, that will resolve the possible DRA movement. The proposed DRA antennas provide more than 25 % matching bandwidth, 1-dB gain bandwidth of more than 20 % and the maximum radiation efficiency of 97 % (at 5.8 GHz).