A Two-Element Capsule Antenna for Near-Field Polarization MIMO in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy
Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology is considered to be a viable method for spectral efficiency and data rate enhancement in wireless communications. This article presents a two-element capsule antenna with orthogonal current distributions for polarization multiplexing in a wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) application at 915 MHz. The proposed antenna was evaluated in a MIMO link where it served as the transmitter and an existing on-body antenna was the receiver. The performance was assessed in two distinct environments: an anatomically accurate human body model using full-wave (FW) simulations, and a homogeneous liquid tissue phantom, using both FW simulations and measurements. The former was used to evaluate the performance in a realistic environment and to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed capsule antenna against existing two-element antennas in the literature, while the latter aimed at verifying the antenna design by comparison of simulated and measured MIMO links. We studied channel capacity and eigenvalues for the comparisons. The MIMO link with the proposed antenna provided nearly doubled median channel capacity relative to a baseline single-input-single-output link, consistently in the simulations and measurements. Our results prove the suitability of the proposed antenna for polarization multiplexing and, in terms of channel capacity, establish it as the best conformal two-element capsule antenna design at 915 MHz.