Compact and Wideband PIFA Design for Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

Abstract

The specific advantage of fractal geometry to realize compact antenna features is exploited in this work for the design of a miniaturized Planar Inverted-F Antenna configuration with a large bandwidth. The conventional quadrilateral radiating element of a Planar Inverted-F Antenna is replaced by a Minkowski pre-fractal-based shape, thus increasing the resonant wavelength without affecting the overall antenna dimensions. Consequently, with the new design, a physically smaller antenna can achieve the same resonant frequency of a larger conventional configuration. Measured as well as simulated reflection coefficient and radiation patterns are presented to validate the assumptions. The impedance bandwidth of the antenna (2.19 to 2.52 GHz) covers the ISM band with a boresight gain of 1.5–2 dB over the entire band. Furthermore, to demonstrate the miniaturization effect, a successful comparison is provided with an identically sized, conventional square Planar Inverted-F Antenna design. The proposed antenna design can be usefully adopted for power-efficient communications in the framework of Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks.