2017 2nd IEEE International Conference On Recent Trends in Electronics Information & Communication Technology (RTEICT), May 19-20,
2017, India
Design of PLUS-slot Microstrip Patch Antenna
for Bluetooth and Wi-MAX applications
AbhinavSrivastva Saurabh Chandra
School of Electronics Engineering, School of Electronics Engineering,
KIIT University, Bhubaneswar, KIIT University,Bhubaneswar,
srivastavaabhinav31@gmail.com saurabh22chandra@gmail.com
Pranaw Kumar,
School of Electronics Engineering,
KIIT University, Bhubaneswar,
kumarpranaw9@gmail.com
Abstract—Most of the devices are small in size and require
small-size antennas. In this paper, we have investigated a
unique design of microstrip antenna with three PLUS-slot of
equal area. The geometry is such that three PLUS symbol at an
angle of 0º, 45º and 90º. Simulation has been made using HFSS
software. Results of proposed antenna proves it to be a good
candidate for Bluetooth and WiMAX applications.Good
bandwidth, uniform radiation pattern, VSWR value nearly
equal to 1 gives excellent impedance matching and better gain
of the antenna are achieved.
Keywords—S-parameter, Radiation pattern, Gain,
antenna, Bandwidth.
I. INTRODUCTION
Though microstrip antenna has many advantages, it has
some limitations too. Researchers are putting their efforts to
minimize these limitations. Microstrip antennas are widely
applicable for Global Positioning System, wireless local area
network, mobile communication system, microwave
sensors, etc. Various advantages of Microstrip antenna
include slight weight, low profile, easy fabrication
[1].Microstrip antennas are basically realized by cutting
slots on patch. A slot cut Microstrip antenna depending on
the used frequency range results bandwidth in between
20%to 45% along with gain of 5dBi to 8.5dBi [9]. The gain
can be increased by using some specific geometry of the
slots. Moreover it also results broader bandwidth. Slot does
not introduce any extra mode but reduces the resonance
frequency of higher order modes and also effect the
fundamental patch mode. However introduction of these
slots pause a modification of the surface current distribution
at modes of higher order. These results a broadside radiation
pattern distributed over an entire bandwidth. As mentioned
earlier microstrip antenna has some limitations like narrow
bandwidth, low power handling capability, low gain, low
efficiency and extraneous radiation from feed. However
these limitations can be minimized by using techniques like
cutting slot, loading Gunn or Tunnel diode, shorting wall &
pin and gap coupling. Many researchers have used the
mentioned technique for analysis of different Microstrip
antenna. Different feeding techniques are used for the
analysis of microstrip antenna. It includes aperture coupled
feeding, co-axial feeding [2], proximity coupled feeding and
microstrip line feeding. A various structures have been
investigated in order to overcome the limitations of
microstrip antenna. Structures investigated as U-shaped
978-1-5090-3704-9/17/$31.00 © 2017 IEEE
Avdhesh Kumar
School of Electronics Engineering,
KIIT University, Bhubaneswar,
avdhesh2004@gmail.com
Jibendu Sekhar
RoySchool of Electronics Engineering,
KIIT University, Bhubaneswar,
drjsroy@rediffmail.com
patch [3], π-shaped patch [4], H -shaped microstrip antenna
[5]. Antenna applicable for Bio-medical and for WLAN and
Wi-MAX have been reported. Similarly double C -shaped
antenna [7], T -shaped slot patch antenna [8] which various
advantages have been designed. A microstrip patch antenna
having optimum gain has been studied. The geometry of
microstrip antenna resembles PLUS-slot. The patch consists
of three PLUS-slot at an angle of0º, 45º and 90º. The
intension of choosing such a structure is to study the
propagation characteristics of design antenna.
Patch
II. PROPOSED ANTENNA DESIGN
A. Microstrip Antenna and Basic Design Equations
Microstrip antenna, in its basic form, consists of a
conducting patch on one side of a dielectric substrate (of
thickness h and dielectric constant H r ). It is separated by a
ground plane. Generally, microstrip antenna is fed by a
coaxial SMA connector (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Microstrip antenna configuration
In order to calculate the dimension of a microstrip
patch at 2.45GHz, the following design formulas are used
[9]. The effective length of the patch Leff can be obtained
by using formula
c
Leff (1)
2 f o H reff
Where f o is operating frequency, ‘ c ’ is the velocity of
light, H reff is the effective dielectric constant and the width
( w ) of the antenna can be calculated by using the formula
2154
 2017 2nd IEEE International Conference On Recent Trends in Electronics Information & Communication Technology (RTEICT), May 19-20, 2017, India

c
w (2)
Hr 1
2 fo
2
Effective dielectric constant ( H reff ), length extension ( 'L )
and the length of the patch ( L ) can be obtained by using the
following formula[9]
H r 1 H r 1 h 1
H reff  [1  12 ] 2 (3) Figure 3. Schematic view of rotated PLUS slot microstrip patch.
2 2 w
w Substrate employed for designing the proposed antenna
(H reff  0.3)(  0.264) is Rogers RT/duroid 5880(tm). The dielectric constant value
'L 0.412h h (4)
w for this substrate is H r 2.2 . Antenna has been optimized
(H reff  0.258)(  0.8) to operate at a frequency2.45GHz. The height ( h )
h
considered for the designed antenna is 0.287cm. and loss
L Leff  2'L (5)
tangent tanG 0.0009 is used for antenna design. The
B. Design of Plus-slot MicrostripAntenna Using HFSS antenna has been designed to operate at 2.45GHz. The final
Software dimensions of the patch, after simulation using HFSS, are:
Length of substrate=10cm, width of substrate=09cm, length
Configuration of the proposed PLUS-slot microstrip
patch antenna is shown in Fig. 2. The geometry of the of patch ( L )=5cm, width of patch( w )=3.6cm, PLUS-slot
designed microstrip patch antenna resembles a PLUS sign. width ‘ A1, B1 & C1 ’is0.2cm, PLUS-slot length
The patch consists of three PLUS-slot. It can be seen that the A2, B 2 & C 2 ’ is 1cm.
PLUS-slot has been rotated at 0º, 45º and 90º.PLUS-slot has
equal width of ‘A1, B1 & C1’. Radiating patch has width III. SIMULATION AND RESULTS
and length of ‘W’ and ‘L’ respectively. The length of the
Reflected power by incident power termed as
PLUS-slot is ‘A2, B2 & C2’.
Reflection coefficient. It is also known as Return loss or
S11 parameter. The simulation result for return loss
or S11 parameter of unique PLUS-slot microstrip patch
antenna is shown in Fig. 4.

Figure 4. Return loss plot of the designed antenna.

Figure 2. PLUS-slot microstrip antenna
Ansoft HFSS software. It works on finite element method
(FEM) and used for designing antenna. First, the dimension
of patch antenna with PLUS-slot is calculated at 2.45GHz
using the formula, given by equation (1) to equation (5).
Then the PLUS-slot is incorporated on the patch and the
new dimensions of the feed position are obtained for desired
resonance frequency, VSWR, bandwidth and gain using
HFSS software. HFSS software generated view of the
simulated antenna is shown in Fig. 3.
The proposed antenna has got its lower cut-off
frequency(-10dBline) at 2.4GHz and similarly has got its
upper cut-off frequency at2.49GHz. The bandwidth of the
proposed antenna reported is 3.26%(which is nearly around
90MHz Bandwidth) at optimum frequency of
2.4511GHzwhich is more than sufficient for Bluetooth
application. Simulated antenna reports return loss of about -
22dB at two different resonating frequencies. The resonating
frequencies where such return loss has been observed are
2.4511GHZ and 3.2141GHz respectively.The radiation
pattern of the antenna can be explained with Fig. 5. It shows
broadside radiation pattern.

2155
 2017 2nd IEEE International Conference On Recent Trends in Electronics Information & Communication Technology (RTEICT), May 19-20, 2017, India
TABLE II: Summary of the results.
fr(GHz) Return Loss(dB) VSWR Bandwidth
2.4511GHZ -21.9568dB 1.3897 3.26%
3.2141GHz -20.0009dB 1.7428 2.17%

CONCLUSION
In this paper, a unique slot of patch antenna has been
studied. The proposed design has resulted a very low VSWR
value of 1.3897 and 1.7428 which shows a positive
approach for perfect matching. Moreover, the return loss
observed for the proposed design was about -22dB and -
Figure 5. Radiation pattern plot for the designed antenna.
20dB at an optimum frequency of 2.4511GHz and
Degree of match between the transmission line and 3.2141GHz. The gain reported at the optimum frequency of
antenna is measured in terms of VSWR. The VSWR value 2.4511GHz is about 7.62dB. It is to be noted that the
observed at resonating frequencies 1.3897 and 1.7428 bandwidth reported for the designed antenna is 3.26% (90
respectively in Fig. 6. These value confirms the easy MHZ) and 2.17% (70 MHZ). Thus we can say that the
fabrication of antenna. For fabrication, VSWR value should proposed antenna was unidirectional behavior and its dual
be less than 2. band operational characteristics and it can be considered as a
good candidate for Bluetooth and Wi-MAX applications.
The future work is to fabricate and measure the antenna.
Using shorting pin, slit loaded on patch, to improve the
radiation characteristics, bandwidth and gain and also the
overall area of the patch can be reduced more, which is also
one of the future works.
REFERENCES
[1] Koen W.A. Van Dongen, Peter M. Van den Berg, and Loan
Nicolaescu, “Subsurface imaging using measured near-field antenna
footprints”, Near Surface Geophysics, February 2004, Vol. 2, Number
I, pp. 31-37, ISSN: 1569-4445.
[2] K. F. Lee, K. M. Luk, K. F. Tong, S. M. Shum, T. Huynh, and R. Q.
Lee,”Experimental and simulation studies of coaxially fed U-slot
Figure 6. VSWR plot of the designed antenna. rectangular patch antenna”, Inst. Elect. Eng. Proc. Microwave
Antennas Propagat., vol. 144, pp.354-358,1997.
Gain of the simulated antenna at its resonating frequency is [3] P. Kumar, M. Chandan, and R. Prasad, “Design of U Shaped
7.62dBas shown in Fig. 7. Microstrip Patch Antenna for Dual Band Frequency Application”, in
Proceedings of the Conference on Advances in Communication and
Control Systems-2013, 2013.
[4] Rahman, M. M., Hossain, M.M., and Karmakar, K.K., “π-shape
microstrip antenna design for Wi-MAX, Wi-Fi and bbiomedical
application at 2.45 GHz”, IEEE 3rd International Advance Computing
Conference (lACC), Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, 22-23 Feb
2013, pp. 546-549.
[5] A. Kumar, P. Kumar, A. Deb, “An Ɛ-shaped microstrip antenna with
unidirectional propagation”, International Conference on
Communication and Signal Processing(ICCSP’ 15), Melmaruvathur,
April 2015.
[6] S. Kapoor, D. Parkash, “Efficient Microstrip Fed Rectangular Patch
Antenna with DGS for WLAN & WiMAX Applications”, IJERA Vol.
2, Issue 6, November- December 2012, pp.044-047.
[7] P. Kumar, A. Kumar and S. Panda, “Design of double C-shaped
microstrip antenna for application in UWB region”, International
Conference on Communication and Signal Processing(ICCSP'15),
Melmaruvathur, April 2015.
Figure 7. Gain plot for the simulated patch. [8] M. Thomas, J. S. Roy, B. Gupta and A. Rydberg, “T – Coupled
Microstrip Patch Antenna for WLAN”, International Conference on
TABLE I: Results of antenna proposed. Communication and Electronics System Design, 876006 (28 January
Resonating Frequencies 2.4511GHz 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2009581.
Return Loss -21.9568dB [9] C. A. Balanis, Antenna Theory- Analysis and Design, 3rd edition,
Wiley,2005
VSWR 1.3897
Radiation Pattern Unidirectional
Gain Total 7.62dB
Bandwidth 3.26% (90MHZ)

2156