Ultra-High Frequency Radio-Frequency Identification (UHF RFID) tags have been studied as one of the potential alternatives for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN), owing to their versatility and capacity to enable wireless communication across a range of applications. However, one of the major challenges associated with the tag is the electromagnetic interaction between the tag and the human body, which affects the tag’s read range. Therefore, this study was conducted to propose and design a reduced-size Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) structure to improve the read range. An AMC unit cell was proposed and optimized to operate at 920 MHz using the CST Microwave Studio. A 3 x 3 array AMC structure was fabricated and its performance was examined and validated in terms of read range by experimentally testing it on the human body. When compared to the conventional square-patch-based AMC, the suggested AMC with a unit cell size of 74 mm achieved a size reduction of 24.4%. Based on the experimental findings, the AMC improved the on-body read range by 367% with an increase of 1.1 m. In addition, the suggested AMC has a simple configuration and is easy to fabricate. Therefore, it is anticipated that the proposed design applied in wearable UHF RFID applications.
Paramasivam et al. (Tue,) studied this question.