A thin surface-wave antenna using a via-less EBG structure for 2.45 GHz ON-Body communication systems

A 2mm-thick surface wave antenna suited for On-Body communication systems is presented. The antenna consists in an artificial ground plane excited by a center-fed circular patch and exhibits a monopole-like radiation pattern. The proposed antenna performances (return loss, radiation pattern, efficiency, SAR calculation and non-line-of-sight path loss) are evaluated thanks to a tissue-equivalent numerical phantom and compared to other existing wearable antennas found in the literature. It appears that our antenna is a good solution for On-Body communication applications, especially when antenna thickness is a critical parameter.