Design, Simulation and Measurement of Metapocket: An All-textile Reflective Metasurface for On-body Smartphone Radiation Improvement

A polarization-independent all-textile reflective metasurface – the metapocket, is presented in this paper. This design aims at enhancing gain, and radiation efficiency and reducing the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) of a smartphone antenna when it is placed inside a jacket pocket close to the human body. During the design process, the state-of-the-art smartphone structure, the impact of varying unit cell numbers on reflectivity and the nature of textile materials have been taken into consideration. Also, an AI-driven antenna design algorithm is employed. Full wave simulations with a voxel human body model and real measurement with smartphone vivo iQOO validate the effectiveness of the metapocket. The effect of applying the metapocket is quantified with an anechoic chamber radiation pattern measurement and a reverberation chamber radiation efficiency measurement. Results reveal a 3.17 dB realized gain increase, 34.37% radiation efficiency improvement, and a more than 85% SAR reduction are achieved in the on-body scenario. The proposed design has a high potential for improving smartphone communication with various Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable devices.