Wearable, small, and robust: the circular quarter-mode textile antenna

A miniaturized wearable antenna, entirely implemented in textile materials, is proposed that relies on a quarter-mode substrate integrated waveguide topology. The design combines compact dimensions with high body-antenna isolation, making it excellently suited for off-body communication in wearable electronics/smart textile applications. The fabricated antenna achieves stable on-body performance. A measured on-body impedance matching bandwidth of 5.1% is obtained, versus 4.8% in free space. The antenna gain equals 3.8 dBi in the on-body and 4.2 dBi for the free-space scenario. High radiation efficiency, measured to be 81% in free space, is combined with a low calculated specific absorption rate of 0.45 mW/g, averaged over 1 g of tissue, with 500 mW input power

Variable link performance due to weather effects in a long-range, low-power LoRa sensor network

When aiming for the wider deployment of low-power sensor networks, the use of sub-GHz frequency bands shows a lot of promise in terms of robustness and minimal power consumption. Yet, when deploying such sensor networks over larger areas, the link quality can be impacted by a host of factors. Therefore, this contribution demonstrates the performance of several links in a real-world, research-oriented sensor network deployed in a (sub)urban environment. Several link characteristics are presented and analysed, exposing frequent signal deterioration and, more rarely, signal strength enhancement along certain long-distance wireless links. A connection is made between received power levels and seasonal weather changes and events. The irregular link performance presented in this paper is found to be genuinely disruptive when pushing sensor-networks to their limits in terms of range and power use. This work aims to give an indication of the severity of these effects in order to enable the design of truly reliable sensor networks

Indoor body-to-body LoRa link characterization

This contribution examines the performance of LoRa in an indoor, body-centric IoT context. This was achieved by deploying custom-made wearable LoRa nodes, featuring a textile substrate-integrated-waveguide antenna, on the chests of test persons who walked around in a modern office environment, logging the strength of the link between them. Both the influence of the test person’s bodies as well as the challenging environment, which includes large masses of reinforced concrete, are investigated. The measured channel characterization data illustrate the excellent performance achieved by combining the building penetration qualities of signals at sub-GHz frequencies and the high link budget of the LoRa modulation standar

LoRa base-station-to-body communication with SIMO front-to-back diversity

The LoRa standard is currently widely employed for low-power long-range wireless sensor networks at sub-GHz frequency bands. The longer wavelengths associated with sub-GHz technology provide excellent radiowave propagation characteristics, yielding a much larger coverage than the higher frequency bands. In the case of wearable sensors, the 868 MHz band can be covered by textile substrate-integrated-waveguide antennas of a convenient size. In body-centric communication systems, front-to-back (F/B) diversity is an important asset to mitigate the shadowing of the antennas by the presence of the human body. This article describes a diversity textile-antenna-based LoRa platform with integrated transceivers. Outdoor measurement campaigns are conducted to assess the performance of the wearable LoRa nodes with F/B diversity in an urban radio propagation environment at walking and cycling speeds. These experiments prove that large ranges of 1.5 km can easily and reliably be achieved for off-body LoRa communication links. The results demonstrate a significant performance improvement in terms of packet loss in NLoS situations when comparing single-receiver performance with different spatial receiver diversity applications. In addition, link budget increases up to 5.5 dB, owing to the realized diversity gain