Shorting strategies for a wearable L-slot planar inverted-F antenna

Wearable antennas are one of the key technologies supporting wearable wireless communication systems. A wearable textile L-slot planar inverted-F antenna is investigated in this paper with different shorting methods, namely a folded strip of silver fabric, embroidered vias and eyelets. The performance of the proposed antenna with these three shorting methods is compared through simulations with realistic shorting models. According to the obtained numerical results, the antenna has three resonances at 4.5 GHz, 5.0 GHz and 6.6 GHz. In terms of gain and efficiency, the embroidered vias shorting method, which is the simplest and cheapest method to implement, has slightly lower performance than the silver fabric folded strip and eyelet shorting methods due to its higher resistance.