Inverse Design of Rectangular Microstrip Patch
Antenna using Neural Network Combining with
Time-Domain Representation of S-parameters
Yue Su1, Zhiguo Su2, Hongtai Chen1, Hongxin Zhao1, Xiaoxing Yin1
1
State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University, 210096 Nanjing, China;
1
suyue@seu.edu.cn;2zhiguo_su_phd@163.com; 3xxyin@seu.edu.cn;
Abstract—In this study, a multilayer perceptron (MLP)
neural network is utilized to inversely design a rectangular
microstrip patch antenna. The MLP network maps the input
features, including the resonant frequency, directivity, realized
gain, and time-domain representation of the S-parameters, to
the output that is the antenna geometrical parameters.
Especially with the time-domain representation of S-
parameters added into the input features, the prediction error
of the antenna geometrical parameters can be decreased
dramatically. The mean square error (MSE) and mean
absolute error (MAE) are 0.00432% and 0.484% for the test
dataset, respectively. The promising results verified that
incorporating the time-domain representation of S-parameters
into the features could effectively improve the prediction
accuracy of the MLP network for inverse antenna design.
Index Terms—Inverse antenna design, MLP neural
network, rectangular microstrip patch antenna, time-domain
representation of S-parameters.
I. INTRODUCTION
Microstrip patch antennas are widely used in mobile
communication, wireless communications, and remote
sensing due to their low profile, ease of manufacture,
conformability. At present, several methods and empirical
formulas are available for designing microstrip patch
antenna. However, the performance of the antenna designed
using empirical formulas has a deviation from that of full-
wave simulation. Also, many times full-wave simulation
trials are inevitable to achieve an antenna design for the
desired performance.
Meanwhile, artificial neural networks have gained
attention as a fast and flexible vehicle for EM modeling,
analysis, and design. The nonlinear mapping between
electromagnetic responses and antenna geometrical
parameters can be quickly constructed by different neural
network models, which can effectively relieve time-
consuming full-wave simulations and improve the efficiency
of antenna design. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural
network and radial basis function (RBF) neural network have
been successfully implemented to map the microstrip patch
antenna geometrical parameters to its resonant frequency [1]-
[3]. Furthermore, the neural network can also be used to
learn the relationship between the feeding position of the
antenna and the input impedance in order to optimize and
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enlarge the antenna bandwidth [4]-[6]. It is worth noting that
most of the methodologies utilizing neural network models
for antenna design are the forward analysis process, i.e., the
input features of the network are antenna geometrical
parameters and the output is the electromagnetic response.
However, few studies are reported for the inverse process,
which is specifically the inverse antenna design using the
neural network. The inverse neural network model can be
used to obtain the accurate geometric parameters of the patch
antenna directly from the expected electromagnetic response.
The whole process takes only a few microseconds to
complete the prediction, which greatly reduces the time of
simulation and optimization, reduces design cost, and has a
good application prospect.
In this paper, we propose an inverse antenna design using
an MLP network. Apart from the conventional antenna
fundamental parameters, including the antenna resonant
frequency, directivity, and realized gain, the time-domain
representation of the S-parameters is incorporated to improve
the prediction accuracy of the antenna geometrical
parameters. The time-domain representation of the S-
parameters is obtained by the inverse discrete Fourier
transform (IDFT). Compared with the conventional MLP
network model, the proposed MLP network model
combining with the time-domain representation of S-
parameters a lower mean square error (MSE) and mean
absolute error (MAE). The MLP network model does not
become complicated when the input information of neural
network is increased, which shows the effectiveness of the
proposed method. Testing results demonstrate that our
method outperforms other traditional neural networks for
inverse antenna design.
II. RECTANGULAR MICROSTRIP PATCH ANTENNA FOR
MODELING
The configuration of the rectangular microstrip antenna
for modeling is depicted in Fig. 1. As the input impedance of
the patch antenna is not equal to 50-ohm at the resonant
frequency, and thus two parallel slots are introduced into the
patch antenna to obtain a good impedance match. In the
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inverse design, the antenna electromagnetic responses,
consisting of the resonant frequency, directivity, realized
gain, and the time-domain representation of S-parameters are
utilized to predict the antenna geometrical parameters, i.e.,
the length Lp and width Wp of the patch, the length Lg and
width Wg of the dielectric substrate, and the slot length Le of
the feed line. Other parameters of the antenna are set as
follows: the relative dielectric constant is 1.6; the thickness
of the dielectric substrate is 1.15 mm; the copper thickness of
the patch is 0.035 mm; the width of the 50-ohm feed line is
4.2mm. The antenna electromagnetic responses are obtained
through full-wave electromagnetic simulation. Four hundred
simulations of antennas with resonant frequencies distributed
between 1.5 GHz and 14.5 GHz are performed. The
simulated results are collected as the raw datasets, where
60%, 20%, and 20% are used for train, validation, and test,
respectively.
Fig. 1. Configuration of the rectangular microstrip patch antenna.
III. MLP NETWORK FOR INVERSE DESIGN
A. Feature Extraction
In conventional design, only the antenna at the resonant
frequency point, including the realized gain and S11, are
considered. However, a comprehensive feature extraction of
the antenna should be performed in the concerned frequency
range instead of the single resonant frequency. Therefore, the
time-domain representation of S-parameters, considering
magnitude and phase information in the concerned frequency
range, could be a viable solution. As the time-domain
representation of S-parameters is utilized as an input feature
to the neural network, more information can be used to train
the neural network to be more robust and accurate.
The time-domain representation of S-parameters can be
directly obtained using IDFT. Note that the representation
includes real and imaginary parts because the S-parameters
in the concerned frequency range are bandpass data. As is
shown in Fig. 2, the time-domain representation of S-
parameters has only several non-zero values spanning within
a small interval. The time-domain representation of the S-
parameters comparing to the one in the frequency-domain,
while it is represented as a short pulse with a smaller amount
of data. Instead of using the whole S-parameters data in the
concerned frequency range, much less time-domain non-zero
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representation data are enough to characterize the antenna,
such that the scale of the MLP network can be reduced. In
order to verify the effectiveness of using the above non-zero
values to represent the S-parameters, those non-zero values
that are input to the neural network are reserved, and
assigned the remaining values to zero. With the discrete
Fourier transform, the S-parameters curve as shown in Fig. 3
was obtained. It can be seen that the curves are consistent
with each other over the entire frequency range, with only a
small jitter at the beginning and end of the frequency range.
Fig. 2. Time-domain representation of S-parameters.
Fig. 3. The discrete Fourier transform of time-domain representation of S-
parameters with only a few non-zero values.
B. Structure of the Inverse Model
The MLP network employed in this paper consists of
input layer, hidden layer and output layer. Rectified Linear
Unit (ReLU) function is one of the most commonly used
activation functions. Its high computational efficiency
enables the network to converge rapidly. However, when
the input is negative, the gradient of ReLU function
becomes zero, which makes the neural network cannot carry
out back propagation, which is resultful for resulting in
invalid neurons. While the Leaky ReLU activation function
has a small slope for negative inputs, as in (1), so the
gradient of the Leaky ReLU function is not zero, solving the
possible problem with the ReLU function described above.
Take data preprocessing into account, in order to increase
the degree of differentiation between different samples, the
data is redistributed to the interval from -1 to 1 through
max-minimum normalization method. The Leaky ReLU
activation function is chosen because it can relieve the
vanishing/exploding gradient effectively and provide
enough nonlinearity.
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  x ,x ≥ 0
y= (1)
α x , x < 0

C. Training
For the sake of achieving the optimal balance between
memory efficiency and capacity, batch training is usually
used in neural network training. Batch size affects the
convergence speed and accuracy of neural network model. In
a dataset with a small number of samples, it is feasible not to
use batch size, but to use the random gradient descent
method to get the gradient based on the whole dataset. In a
(a)
large dataset, however, this approach is bound to cause
memory explosions. When the batch size is too small, the
gradient will change dramatically, making it difficult for the
neural network to converge. Epoch means that all training
samples have completed a process of forward propagation
and back propagation in the neural network. With the
increase of epoch, the weight is updated constantly, which
makes the neural network from under-fitting to over-fitting.
Therefore, a total of 45 groups of different batch sizes and
epochs combinations were selected to compare their impact
on network performance.
As shown in Fig. 4, when batch size is equal to 16, the
neural network can quickly converge to a small value, but
the accuracy of the model has been fluctuating and it is
difficult to stabilize with the increase of the epoch. When the (b)
Fig. 5. Variation of error with the number of hidden layers. (a) MSE. (b)
MAE.

batch size is equal to 32, 64 and 128, the accuracy of the

neural network does not differ much. Therefore, if the
accuracy of the neural network is accurate, the performance
of the neural network can no longer be optimized by
increasing the batch size. When batch size is equal to 240, in
essence, batch size is not used. In this case, the neural
network may converge to the optimal solution near the initial
value, and with the increase of batch size, more epochs are
needed to achieve the same accuracy. Therefore, the batch
size and epoch are selected as 32 and 8000 respectively.
The number of hidden layers and the number of neurons
(a) in each hidden layer are determined by the amount of input
data. When the number of hidden layers or neurons is too
small, it may cause insufficient learning of neural network in
the under-fitting state. On the contrary, when the number of
hidden layers or neurons is too large, it may cause over-
fitting of neural network, that is, the learning of samples is
good but the unknown data cannot be correctly predicted.
Fig. 5 shows the performance comparison of neural networks
with different structures under the same input conditions. It
can be seen that the neural network with two hidden layers
has the smallest error.

D. Testing
(b) The MLP network employed in this paper consists of an
Fig. 4. Variation of error with epoch number and batch size. (a) MSE. (b) input layer, two dense layers as its hidden layers, and an
MAE. output layer, with 191, 128, 32, and 5 neurons, respectively.

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The mean square error (MSE) and mean absolute error IV. CONCLUSION
(MAE) of the proposed inverse neural network model for In this paper, an inverse antenna design methodology is
train, validation, and test are shown in Table I. MSE and demonstrated. Constructing the resonant frequency,
MAE quantitatively measure the difference between the
predicted and the desired antenna geometrical parameters. directive, realized gain, and the time-domain representation
Both the lower MSE and MAE indicate that our method and of S-parameters as the input features of the MLP network
model outperform those in [7]. can significantly decrease the prediction error of the antenna
To verify the predicted antenna geometrical parameters, geometrical parameters (improve the prediction accuracy).
the full-wave simulated results of the antennas constructed The predicted antenna performance also shows a good
with the predicted and the desired antenna geometrical agreement with the desired antenna performance.
parameters are compared. As is shown in Fig. 6, a good
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(a)

(b)
Fig. 6. Simulated results of the desired and predicted antennas. (a) S11. (b)
Directivity and realized gain.

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