Near Field Coupling in Wireless Systems for Identification, Sensing and Communication

Antennas for radio communication systems (e.g. radio links, cellular networks, WLAN, remote sensing) are designed giving a lot of attention to antenna gain, polarization, radiation pattern characteristics (e.g. half power beam width, front to back ratio, etc.). All above parameters are defined in the antenna far-field (FF) region, so they are suitable to characterize a communication system in which the transmitter and the receiver antennas are far enough. On the other hand, some applications exist that exploit antenna features in its near-field (NF) region. In this context, NF coupling between antennas has been studied since a long time and most researches have been focused on coupling effects in antenna arrays, field sensing for near-field antenna scanning systems, magnetic coupling between loops operating at LF-HF frequency bands. During his PhD course, the author designed and tested several antennas for Near-Field applications such as UHF RFID Desktop Reader. Moreover, he developed numerical codes to analyze a novel method to estimate the deep human tissues status with a near-field sensor, determining its prediction capability and determining critical parameters that affect its accuracy. Finally, he studied the mutual coupling effect between antennas integrated in commercial PV panels for wireless communication systems.