A Low-Profile Textile MIMO Antenna using Felt

substrate for Industrial, Scientific and Medical Band

Sana Ullah, Raúl Fernández-García and Ignacio Gil
Department of Electronic Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Terrassa, Spain
*e-mail: ignasi.gil@upc.edu

Abstract— A low profile textile MIMO antenna design for II. METHODOLOGY
Industrial scientific and medical bands at 5.8 GHz is presented.
The design consists of 2 embroidered antennas based on A. Antenna Design
vertical and horizontal strips with a shared partial ground The antenna is composed of vertical and horizontal
structure on Felt substrate. The dimensions of the designed strips with a partial ground plane in a mirror image manner.
MIMO are 50×50×1 mm3 with a permittivity of 1.2 and 0.02
The felt substrate (εr=1.2 and tanδ=0.02) with 50×50×1
loss tangent. An isolation of 18 dB between the two ports is
achieved. The gain and the efficiency of the flat textile MIMO
mm3 dimensions.
antenna are 3.64 dBi and 98%, respectively. Bending impact The configuration of the proposed MIMO antenna is shown
with different radius has been considered with a slight shift in in the Fig 1. Both antennas are designed to be embrodered
the resonance frequency and a small reduction of gain, on the top and bottom centre of the felt substrate. Each
efficiency and isolation in the ISM band. The Envelope antenna consists of different strips with a lower vertical strip
Correlation Coefficient (ECC) between the antennas is less for feeding. The impedance matching is controlled by
than 0.01 at the operation frequency band. varying the width and the length of the strips whereas the
resonance frequency is obtianed by clearing the upper and
Index Terms— MIMO Antennas, Gain, Isolation, Envelope lower ground plane and placing the strips on the center
Corelation Coefficient. edges. Increasing the width of the horizental strip results in
higher operating frequency. The summary of the design
I. INTRODUCTION parameters are given in Table 1.
Nowadays, there is a significant attention towards
wearable devices due to their extensive applications, such as B. Simulation Results
health monitoring, sports and navigation [1-2]. Multiple The MIMO design has been electromagnetically
input multiple output (MIMO) technology enhances channel simulated by means of CST Studio. The simulation results
capacity without additional bandwidth and power [3]. The of the proposed MIMO antenna are depicted in the Fig 2.
antenna distribution is typically required to be compact and The impedance bandwidth of the proposed MIMO antenna
closely spaced, which results in strong mutual coupling that with respect to -10 dB is 2.274 GHz (4.92-7.194 GHz) that
degrades the efficiency of the antenna and can be controlled effectively covers the ISM band. A 18 dB isolation is
by decoupling structure [4]. Due to the current need of achieved at operating frequency which is applicable for
miniaturized on-body wireless devices, there is an increase MIMO antennas. The performance of the antenna can also
in the development of flexible wearable devices using observed from surface current distribution in the Fig 3. The
textile substrates. Textile substrates allow conformal low maximum current intensity is circulated along the feeding
profile, comfortable and low cost antennas although their and horizental strips, respectivecly. The 3D gain pattern for
radiation performance is reduced in comparison with PCB the MIMO antenna is shown Fig 4. The gain of both
antennas due to the losses produced by the human body antennas are 3.6 dBi. The simulated radiation patterns for E-
tissues [5-7]. Textile MIMO structures allow to achieve plane andf H-plane are displayed in Fig 5. The E-plane
robust radiation performance preserving flexibility, patterns specifies the arrangement of radiating antenna
biocompatibility and user comfort. To the best of our elements in the MIMO design.
knowledge, there is a limited literature on textile MIMO
antennas for wearable devices by considering the
requirements [8-12]. TABLE 1. ANTENNA DESIGN PARAMETERS
In this paper, a low-profile textile MIMO antenna design is Parameters W L W1 W2 W3 W4
presented. The work addresses the simulation process of the Values (mm) 50 50 6.5 0.5 4.5 1
MIMO to be intended to operate at the Industrial, Scientific
Parameters W5 L1 L2 L3 L4 L5
and Medical (ISM) radio band. The simulation and Values (mm) 2.5 0.5 2.5 0.5 3.2 1
optimization are carried out using the commercial CST
Studio Software.
 Substrate

Ant 1

Ground Plane

Ant 2

(a) (b)
(b)

Fig 3 . Surface current distribution of (a) Ant 1 at Phi=0 (b) Ant 2

at Phi=0

(c)
(a) (b)
Fig 1. (a) MIMO antenna on Felt substrate (b) Partial ground plane
(c) Antenna with dimension Fig 4. 3D radiation pattern of (a) Ant 1 (b) Ant 2

(a) (b)

Fig 5. (a) E plane (b) H plane

Fig 2 . S-Parameters of the MIMO Antenna III. BENDING STRUCTURE WITH DIFFERENT RADIUS
The bending of the MIMO structure with different
radius (r=10, 15m, 20m and 30m) are depicted in the Fig 6.
Although a slight shift in the resonance occurs, the
impedance bandwidth is not disturbed and lies in the 5.8
GHz band. The S-parameters of the MIMO antenna after
bending with various radii is shown in the Fig 7. An
isolation of more than 18 dB is achieved with a small
reduction of gain and efficiency as shown in the Fig. 8 and
Fig 9, respectively The envelope correlation coefficient is
caculated from equation (1) using S-parameters [13]. There
is a negligible impact on ECC after bednding the structure
with different radius. The ECC of the flat antenna and
(a)
bending strutures are less than 0.01 in the operating band as
shown in Fig 10.

| ∗ ∗ |
= (1)
( ( | | | ))( ( | | | ))

(d)
(a)
Fig 6. MIMO Structure with (a) r=10mm (b) r=15mm (c) r=20mm
and (d) r=40mm

(b)

Fig7. S-parameters with different radius

(c)

Fig 8. Gain with different radius

 MIMO antenna gives resonance at 5.8 GHz with a 2.274
GHz bandwidth. An isolation of 18 dB is obtained with an
efficiency, gain of 98 % and 3.64 dBi, respectively. A slight
shift in the tuning frequency occurs with a small reduction
of gain and efficiency after bending the structure with
different radius. The envelope correlation coeffiienct is less
than 0.01 that shows good performance and therefore useful
for wearable ISM band applications.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the Spanish Government-
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion under Projects PID2021-
124288OB-I00 and TED2021-131209B-I00.
REFERENCES
Fig 9. Efficiency with different radius
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[3] Foschini, G. J. and M. J. Gans, “On limits of wireless communication in

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[4] Luo, C. M., J. S. Hong, and L. L. Zhong, “Isolation enhancement of a

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[5] Komolafe, Abiodun, Bahareh Zaghari, Russel Torah, Alex Weddell,

Fig 10. Envelope Correlation Coefficient of flat and bending
structure.
The comparsion of the proposed MIMO antenna with the
existing literature at the ISM band is displayed in the table
2.
Hamideh Khanbareh, Zois Michail Tsikriteas, Mark Vousden et al.
"Etextile Technology Review–From Materials to Application." IEEE
Access (2021).
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TABLE 2. COMPARISION OF PROPOSED MIMO WITH THE [8] Kumar, Sanjeev, Durgesh Nandan, Kunal Srivastava, Sachin Kumar,
EXISTING LITERATURE Hari Singh, Mohamed Marey, Hala Mostafa, and Binod Kumar Kanaujia.
"Wideband circularly polarized textile MIMO antenna for wearable
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(mm) (GHz) (dBi) (%) (dB)
Felt [8] 42×32.5×1 5.2 5.7 NR 18 [9] Laxman, Pillalamarri, and Anuj Jain. "Circularly Polarized Wideband
Felt [9] 42×34.5×1 5.25 5.7 NR 18 Fabric Stealth Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Antenna for Ultrawideband
Felt [10] 55×35×1.5 5.8 6.9 NR 26 Applications Useful for Wireless Systems Wearable on Garments."
Felt [11] 37×76×1 5.8 4.3 90 29.26 International Journal of Antennas and Propagation (2021).
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IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a low profile two element textile antenna is
proposed for wearable ISM band applications. The
dimension of the antenna is 50×50×1 mm3. The proposed
[11] Singh, Hari, Binod K. Kanaujia, Ashwani Kumar, Kunal Srivastava,
and Sachin Kumar. "Wideband textile multiple‐input‐multiple‐output
antenna for industrial, scientific and medical (ISM)/wearable applications."
International Journal of RF and Microwave Computer‐ Aided Engineering
30, no. 12 (2020): e22451.
[12] Li, H., S. Sun, B. Wang, and F. Wu. "Design of compact single-layer
textile MIMO antenna for wearable applications." IEEE Transactions on
Antennas and Propagation 66, no. 6 (2018): 3136-3141.

[13] Chacko, B.P., Augustin, G., Denidni, T.A.: ‘Uniplanar slot antenna for
ultrawideband polarization-diversity applications’, IEEE Antennas Wirel.
Propag. Lett., 2013, 12, pp. 88–91.