High Gain Broadband Monopole Antenna for Wireless Communications

S. M. Abbas1, B. Aftab1, E. Qamar1, F. Muzahir1, S. Shahid2, H. Zahra3

Department of Electrical Engineering, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
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Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering, Islamabad, Pakistan muzahir_abbas@comsats.edu.pk, babar_aftab1@hotmail.com, eemanqamar1@gmail.com, fahadmuzahir@gmail.com, saleemshahid@live.com, hijab.zahra@ymail.com
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Abstract In this paper, a wideband monopole antenna with high gain characteristics has been proposed. Number of slits was introduced at the far radiating edge to transform it to multiple monopole radiators. Partial ground plane has been used to widen the bandwidth while by inserting suitable slits at the radiating edges return loss and bandwidth has been improved. The proposed antenna provides high gain up to 13.2dB and the achieved impedance bandwidth is wider than an earlier reported design. FR4 Epoxy with dielectric constant 4.4 and loss tangent 0.02 has been used as substrate material. Antenna has been simulated using HFSS (High Frequency Structure Simulator) as a 3D electromagnetic field simulator, based on finite element method. A good settlement has been found between simulated and measured results. The proposed design is suitable for GSM (890960MHz), GPS (L1:1575.42MHz, L2:1227.60MHz, L3:1381.05MHz, L4:1379.913MHz, L5:1176.45MHz), DCS (17101880MHz), PCS (18501990MHz), UMTS(19202170MHz), WiFi/WLAN/Hiper LAN/IEEE 802.11 2.4GHz (24122484MHz), 3.6GHz (3657.53690.0MHz) and 4.9/5.0GHz (49155825MHz), Bluetooth (24002484MHz), WiMAX 2.3GHz (2.32.5GHz), 2.5GHz (25002690 MHz), 3.3GHz, 3.5GHz (34003600MHz) and 5.8GHz (5.65.9GHz) & LTE applications. Index TermsMicrostrip, Monopole, High gain, Partial ground, Wideband

I.

INTRODUCTION

With the rapid growth of wireless communications in recent years, there is an ever increasing demand for integrated multi-function mobile terminals such as mobile phones, laptops and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). The technology nowadays has converged to such an extent that there is need of an integrated system which should cover all the aspects in regard of applications. Therefore, the integrated terminals should be designed in a manner that can facilitate a number of applications which are considered essential nowadays in end user terminals. For this purpose, the compact integrated terminals are required to operate either in wideband or multi-band. Microstrip patch antennas

are widely used because they are low profile, light weight, low cost, easy to fabricate and provide better efficiency with a good degree of compactness and ease of integration [1-7]. Performance and compactness of an antenna needs to be considered while designing. Several techniques have been described in literature to achieve compactness and performance [8]. To increase gain, parasitic element technique has been presented [9]. To increase impedance bandwidth, slots were entrenched at the sides of patch antenna as compared to the previously proposed antenna with modified ground plane [10], increasing thickness of dielectric substrate [11] and partial ground planes [12, 13] were used but they have limitations like excitation of surface waves and increased antenna size. In this paper, a compact size rectangular planner monopole antenna with high gain has been proposed for broadband wireless applications. The techniques used in this paper covers introduction of slits on the far radiating edge of the patch and partial ground plane which provide wider bandwidth [8], [14-15]. Earlier Ahmed et al. [2] reported a multi standard patch antenna for GSM, PCS, UMTS mobile cellular phones and HYPERLAN applications by introducing two slits at the near radiating edge. This encouraged us to use slits at the far radiating edge. This paper is organized as; Section II provides details about design, whereas results were analyzed and discussed in Section III. Parametric analysis carried out has been presented in section-IV while Section V concludes the paper. II. ANTENNA DESIGN

The proposed antenna design shown in Fig. 1 has been fabricated on FR-4 substrate with dielectric constant of 4.4 and loss tangent of 0.02. Partial ground plane technique [8] has been used to widen the bandwidth. Numbers of slits were introduced at the far radiating edge to transform it to multiple monopole radiators. The dimensions of the antenna are tabulated in Table I.

978-1-4673-4450-0/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

(a) Fig. 2. Return loss of proposed antenna.

Proposed antenna also offers a high gain and is suitable for the above mentioned applications. Gain values at various frequencies are tabulated in Table II. TABLE II. GAIN OF PROPOSED ANTENNA AT VARIOUS
FREQUENCIES

(b) Fig. 1. Proposed antenna design (a) simulated top view (b) fabricated.

Frequency (GHz) 0.8 0.9 1.22 1.575 1.8 1.9 2.1

Gain (dB) 5.2 5.84 8.25 10.31 11.1 11.3 11.5

Frequency (GHz) 2.45 2.5 3.3 3.5 5.0 5.2 5.8

Gain (dB) 12.16 12.39 13.27 12.86 6.1 5.7 4.67

TABLE I. DIMENSIONS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA DESIGN Name Ls Ws Lg Lp Tl Size 50 mm 35 mm 11 mm 32 mm 13 mm Name Wp L1 W1 L2 Tw Size 18 mm 14 mm 0.7 mm 7 mm 2.6 mm

The parameters Ls and Ws are the length and width of substrate respectively. The ground plane length Lg was varied to achieve the required impedance bandwith for the wideband operation of the proposed design. Lp and Wp are the length and width of the patch respectively. All the slits are seperated from each other by a distance of 2.3 mm. The first slit L1 was placed at a distance of 1.5 mm from the edge of patch and the remaining slits are placed adjacent to each other in such a way that L1 slits are placed adjacent to L2 slits. III. ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

B. Radiation Pattern The radiation pattern of the proposed antenna at various frequencies is presented in the Fig. 3.

A. Return loss Characteristics The antenna has been simulated using HFSS. Figure 2 shows the simulated and measured return loss of the proposed antenna design. Results show that the antenna has an impedance bandwidth of 6.3 GHz (0.4 6.7 GHz) with reference to -10dB and is suitable for GSM, GPS, DCS, PCS, UMTS, Bluetooth, WLAN, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, HIPERLAN and LTE applications.

(a) At 800 MHz

(b) At 900 MHz

(e) At 1.8 GHz

(c) At 1.22 GHz

(f) At 1.9 GHz

(d) At 1.575 GHz

(g) At 2.1 GHz

(h) At 2.45 GHz

(k) At 3.5 GHz

(i) At 2.5 GHz

(l) At 5 GHz

(j) At 3.3 GHz

(m) At 5.2 GHz

Fig. 5. Parametric analysis of L1.

(n) At 5.2 GHz Fig. 3. Radiation pattern of proposed antenna at various frequencies.

As the length of the slit was increased there was no significant effect on the bandwidth but the return loss has changed at the lower frequencies. The optimum value of the length of slit L1 with multiple resonances is 14 mm which gives return loss of < -20 dB at two frequencies, one for lower bands of LTE and second for UMTS band. C. Variation of L2 Figure 6, exhibits the return loss due to the length variation of the slit L2 of the proposed design. Return loss is plotted against the values of 5mm, 7mm, 11mm and 13mm.

IV.

PARAMETRIC ANALYSIS

Different parameters of the proposed design have been varied and results are discussed in detail. A. Ground variation The parametric analysis of the ground plane is done to achieve larger impedance bandwidth. Figure 4 explains the trends of the return loss plot for the values of 9mm, 11mm, 20mm and 25mm of the ground plane length.

Fig. 6. Parametric analysis of L2.

Fig. 4. Parametric analysis of ground plane length.

By changing the size of slits L2, there was shifting of the resonant frequency. These slits control the return loss characteristics of the antenna as well as in band resonance at different frequencies. After the parametric analysis, the optimum lengths of slits L2 was selected as 7 mm for desired results. D. Variation in thickness of the slits Figure 7 explains the return loss trends for the varying thickness of the slits L1 and L2 which has been described by the parameter W1 in the Table 1. It was varied and observed at values of 0.4mm, 0.7mm, 1.1mm and 1.5mm.

When the size of the ground plane was increased the shifting of the band and the change in bandwith can be observed in the return loss plot. By this paramtetric sweep analysis, the optimum length of 11 mm was set for the ground plane length for which we have large impedance bandwidth with reasonable return loss. B. Variation of L1 In Fig. 5, the return loss variations due to change in length of the slit L1 were plotted for the length of 6mm, 10mm, 14mm and 18mm.

[8] [9]

K. L. Wong, Compact and Broadband Microstrip Antennas, Wiley, 2002. S. Sakai and H. Arai, Directivity gain enhancement of small antenna by parasitic patch, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium, vol. 1, 1998, pp. 320 323.

[10] S. Satthamsakul, N. Anantrasirichai, C. Benjangkaprasert and T. Wakabayashi, Rectangular patch antenna with inset feed and modified ground-plane for wideband antenna, SICE Annual Conference, 2008, pp. 3400 3403. [11] Ramesh Garg, Prakash Bartia, Indel Bhal and Apsia Ittipiboon, Microstrip Antenna Design Handbook, Artech House, 2001.

Fig. 7. Parametric analysis variation in thickness of the slits W1.

[12] R. Sadeghi Fakhr, A. A. L. Nayestanak and M. N. Moghaddasi, Compact Size And Dual Band Semicircle Shaped Antenna For MIMO Applications, Progress In Electromagnetics Research C, vol. 11, 2009, pp. 147 154. [13] Y. B. Yang, F. S. Zhang, F. Zhang, L. Zhang, and Y. C. Jiao, Design of novel wideband and monopole antenna with a tunable and notched band for 2.4GHz WLAN and UWB applications, Progress In Electromagnetics Research Letters, vol. 13, 2010, pp. 93 102. [14] M. Ali, A. Kachouri and M. Samet, Compact Dual-band Micro strip Antenna for Universal 2.4 /5.2GHz WLAN Applications, International Conference on Communications, Computing and Control Applications (CCCA), Mar. 2011, pp. 1 4. [15] G. A. Lodi, R. I. Zafar and M. Bilal, A novel goblet shaped patch antenna for ultra wide band applications, 12th IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology (ICCT), Nov. 2010, pp. 1096 1099.

As the width of the slits W1 was changed, the center frequency varied and there was a remarkable change observed in the return loss. More over the bandwidth is not much affected by the width of the slits. Optimum width of 0.7 mm for slits W1 was selected after parametric analysis. V. CONCLUSION

A compact high gain monopole antenna with wideband characteristic has been proposed in this paper. The proposed antenna confirm its operation in the frequency range of 0.4-6.69 GHz which covers the frequency bands for GSM, GPS, DCS, PCS, UMTS, Bluetooth, WLAN, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, HIPERLAN and LTE applications. High gain up to 13 dB is the distinguishing feature of the proposed antenna with stable radiation pattern. It is also suitable for the mobile handsets. REFERENCES
[1] Zhengwei Du, Ke Gong and Jeffrey Shiang Fu, A novel compact wide-band planar antenna for mobile handsets, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 54, no. 2, 2006, pp. 613 619. M. Ben Ahmed, M. Bouhorma, F. Elouaai and A. Mamouni, Design of New Multi Standard Patch Antenna GSM/PCS/UMTS/HIPERLAN for Mobile Cellular Phones, European Journal of Scientific Research, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 151157. Naizhi Wang and Jianzhou Li, An L-Sloted Dual-Band microstrip antenna for WiMAX applications, 2nd International Conference on Future Computer and Communication (ICFCC), vol. 1, May 2010, pp. V1-59 V1-61. Youn Suk Jeong, Sang Heun Lee, Ji Hwan Yoon, Won Yong Lee, Woo Young Choi and Young Joong Yoon, Internal mobile antenna for LTE / GSM850 / GSM900 / PCS1900 / WiMAX / WLAN, IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS), Jan. 2010, pp. 559 562. V. S. Kushwah and G. S. Tomar, Size Reduction of Microstrip Patch Antenna Using Defected Microstrip Structures, International Conference on Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT), June 2011, pp. 203 207. P. Mythili, P. Cherian, S. Mridula and B. Paul, Design of a Compact Multiband Microstrip Antenna, Annual IEEE India Conference (INDICON), Dec. 2009, pp. 1 4. M. Ali Babar Abbasi, M. Rizwan, Saleem Shahid, Sabaina Rafique, Haroon Tariq Awan and Syed Muzahir Abbas, A Compact Multiband Antenna for GSM and WiMAX Applications, Emerging Trends and Applications in Information Communication Technologie, Communications in Computer and Information Science, Springer, vol. 281, 2012, pp. 20 30.

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