The effect of All-Textile Metasurface on Cellphone Antenna Radiation in on-body Scenario

In this study, an all-textile reflective metasurface is applied in the scenario with the cellphone placed in a pocket close to the human body. The metasurface aims at providing isolation between the cellphone antenna and the lossy human body. It also directs more energy toward the outside of the body, hence increasing the realized gain and radiation efficiency of the original omnidirectional antenna. The effect of the unit cell dimensions on the overall performance is analyzed. For wearable applications with textile materials, a tradeoff between substrate thickness and unit cell size can be made to achieve an optimal reflecting property for a given antenna with a fixed planar area. Simulation results with voxel data Hugo show that when applied on the human body, cellphone antenna with metasurface can have a realized gain increase up to 7 dB and a radiation efficiency improvement of 19% at the designed frequency.