A Novel and Compact Dual Band Antenna Using

Modified Elliptical Ring Monopole

Anil Kamma, Kaustubh Chhabilwad, G. Shrikanth Reddy and Jayanta Mukherjee

Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
anilkamma@ee.iitb.ac.in, chhabilwadkaustubh@gmail.com, shri@ee.iitb.ac.in, jayanta@ee.iitb.ac.in

Abstract— A novel and compact dual band partial ground
coplanar waveguide (CPW) fed monopole modified elliptical
antenna design is proposed. Dual band antenna is designed to
cover both WLAN band at 2.4 GHz and WiMAX band at 3.5
GHz. Antenna exhibits good return loss characteristics in both
the bands. Antenna is designed on RT/Duroid 5880 with
dielectric constant 2.2, thickness 1.6 mm and loss tangent 0.0009
to improve the efficiency. Antenna parameters are optimized
with respect to dual band characteristics. Based on these
optimized parameters antenna prototype is fabricated. Radiation
pattern of the proposed antenna is quasi semi-omnidirectional.
Parallel agreement between simulated and measured results
makes the proposed dual band antenna suitable candidate for
modern wireless communication systems.
Keywords-component—Dual Band antenna, WLAN and
WiMAX.
I. INTRODUCTION
Dual Band microstrip antennas are attractive due to its
application flexibility, compactness, conformability, light
weight and low cost [1]. With the rapid development of
wireless communication systems, demand for dual band and
multi band system has been increasing. In last couple of years
huge amount research has been reported on dual band and
multi band systems. Antenna design in this dual band system
plays a vital role. The major issue in the design of dual band
antenna is introducing two resonating structures.
However, there are many techniques which have been
adopted to realize dual band antennas. Combinations of two
different rectangular patches are used to produce dual band
characteristics [1-2]. The popular technique in dual band
antenna design is monopole based dual band antennas with
different shapes like Inverted ‘F- shape’, ‘G’, inverted cone,
ring resonator, etc[2-3]. There is a report where dual band
response of the antenna is achieved by incorporating two
different slots which acts as two different resonators [3].
Another straight forward approach is considering first
resonating mode as first band where as higher order resonating
modes are as modeled as second band of the dual band
antenna [4-5].
978-1-4799-6619-6/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
In this paper dual band antenna is fed by using co-planar
waveguide (CPW) technique [6-7]. The reason for choosing
CPW based monopole is its merits such as easy integration
with monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), no
soldering and via (shorting) problems. In addition it requires
only one layer of metallic surface (single side PCB structure).
Dual band characteristics of the antenna are realized by
incorporating modified elliptical ring shaped monopole as
radiator. Proposed antenna is designed to operate in two
famous wireless communication services which are wireless
local area network (WLAN) [6-7] and Worldwide
Interoperability for Microwave Access (Wi-MAX) applications
[8-9].
The operating frequency range of WLAN applications
according to IEEE standard at frequency 2.4 GHz is 2.400
GHz-2.484 GHz. On the other hand rapidly growing modern
wireless communication technology Wi-MAX is operating at
frequency 3.54 GHz over a frequency band from 3.4 GHz to
3.69 GHz [10]. Proposed antenna has advantages like ease of
fabrication, simple to integration and compactness. In addition,
it is also possible to adjust the bandwidths and center resonant
frequencies by changing antenna design parameters. Parametric
analysis of the antenna is carried out using CST microwave
studio.
II. ANTENNA STRUCTURE AND DESIGN
Figure 1. Proposed Dual band antenna geometry (L=11, W= 13, S=2,
W0=2.8, A=9, B=7, a=3.8, b=2.5, r=4, t=0.6 and G=0.9 all dimensions are in
mm).
 The dual band monopole antenna is designed on RT/Duroid
5880 substrate (εr=2.2, thickness =1.6 mm) and loss tangent of
substrate material is tanδ = 0.0009 with total geometrical area
33×22 mm2. The CPW feed for proposed dual band antenna is
given through a 50 Ω CPW line of width W0=2.8 mm and gap
between the feed line and the ground is 0.15 mm and coplanar
ground with length L=11 mm and width 13 mm is used to
excite radiating patch. Fig.1 shows the geometry of the
proposed dual band antenna. The proposed antenna is single
layer structure as CPW feeding is used.
The proposed dual band consists of modified elliptical ring
shaped radiator. The minimum effective dimension of the
elliptic ring monopole antenna to cover WLAN band is quarter
guide wave length at the lowest frequency of the band. Design
procedure of the proposed dual band antenna is as follows.
Initially, antenna design starts with conventional planar
monopole elliptical wide band antenna. It is well known that Figure 2. Parametric variation of the proposed antenna.
planar antennas have more radiation efficiency at the edges and
corners rather than middle portion. Hence, middle portion of
the elliptic monopole is removed by ensuring least significant
change in the other antenna parameters like bandwidth,
radiation pattern, etc. Now, wideband elliptic monopole
antenna is converted to an elliptical ring monopole antenna.
Wide band response of elliptical ring monopole antenna is
transferred to dual band characteristics by removing certain
parts of the elliptical ring where it resonate for the frequencies
other than required bands. Portion of the elliptical ring
monopole is removed in symmetrical manner to make it into
two parts and these two parts are connected by microstrip line.
Partial ground monopole printed antenna provides wide
band by exciting multiple modes. This multi mode
characteristic of the antenna is used to achieve dual band
(a)
characteristics by removing certain portion of the elliptical ring
as shown in Fig.1. The discontinuity causes mismatch at the
middle frequencies between the two desired band consequently
antenna exhibits good isolation between these two bands. To
further understand the design of the proposed antenna,
frequency response based parametric analysis and dominance
of the current distribution analysis is as shown in Fig. 2 and
Fig.3.
As shown in Fig. 2, parametric analysis is carried out by
changing the gap G to get desired dual band characteristics and
to optimize the parameters of the proposed dual band antenna.
For the case where gap G=0.4 mm, second band of the dual
band is ahead of the WiMAX frequency band. In order to make
the second band coincide with WiMAX band the gap ‘G is
increased to a 0.8 mm. However, for G =1 mm case second (b)
band is well within the WiMAX frequency band range, but
there is a disturbance in first band impedance bandwidth which Figure 3. Current distribution of the proposed dual band antenna at (a) 2.4
GHz and (b) 3.6 GHz .
is not coexisting with the WLAN band. To mitigate this
problem the gap G is optimized to G=0.9 mm, where both the
Another important and desired observation which is noticed
bands are covering desired WLAN and WiMAX bands.
is that a good isolation between the two bands of proposed
dual band antenna. As the isolation between the two bands is
more, there is strong impedance miss-match and consequently
strong rejection at those frequencies which lies between the
two desired bands. This strong isolation ensures that S11 is
close to 0 dB at those undesired frequencies between the two
desired frequency bands as shown in Fig.2. Fig.3 shows the
current distribution of the proposed dual band antenna at the
center frequencies of the two bands. The dominance of the
current distibution is limited to certain parts of the antenna
geometry based on excited mode.
III. MEASURED RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 6. Radiation patterns of the proposed antenna at 2.4 GHz

Figure 4. Protype of the proposed dual band antenna

Proposed dual band antenna is fabricated for the optimised

dimentions on the RT/Duroid 5880 substrate (Dielectric
constant 2.2, thickness 1.59 mm and loss tangent 0.0009) as
shown in Fig.4. Fig. 5 shows the measured return loss
characteristics of the propotype. In the WLAN band (first
band) and WiMAX band (second band) return loss is well
below the -20 dB that means most of the power is going to be
radiated and improves antenna efficiency. It is quite
acceptable as S11 is less than standard -10 dB where only 10%
of the power reflects back due to antenna impedance
mismatch.
Figure 7. Radiation pattern of the proposed antenna at 3.6 GHz
IV. CONCLUSION
A novel dual band antenna is designed, optimized and
fabricated for WLAN band at 2.4 GHz and WiMAX band at
3.5 GHz. Moreover, the proposed antenna has several merits
in terms of compactness, single layer structure, omni-
directional radiation pattern and low cost. Antenna is fed by
CPW technique that makes proposed antenna single layer
design and suitable for co-design with MMIC components.
Antenna parametric variations are carried out to optimize
desired dual band characteristics with gain of 2.45 dBi and 3.4
dBi at the two bands. Proposed antenna exhibits good return
loss characteristics i.e. below -30 dB in first band and below -
18 dB in the second band.

Figure 5. Measured return loss characteristics of the proposed dual band
antenna
E-plane radiation patterns at the two bands proposed antenna
resembles to quasi-omnidirectional radiation characteristics as
shown in Fig.6 and Fig.7 respectively. Gain of the proposed
dual band antenna is 2.45 dBi in WLAN band 3.4 dBi in the
WiMAX band.
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