Compact Dual-Band Broadband Microstrip Antenna

at 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz for WLAN Applications

Adnan Ghaffar, Xue Jun Li, Boon-Chong Seet

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Auckland University of Technology
Auckland 1010, New Zealand
Email: {aghaffar, xuejun.li, boon-chong.seet}@aut.ac.nz

Abstract— A planar monopole antenna with dual-band and but there is limit to achieve wideband characteristics at 5 GHz
overall compact size of 18 × 12 mm2 is presented in this paper. for WLAN with large antenna size. Similarly, several dual-
The designed antenna radiates at 2.4 and 5.2 GHz frequencies, band slot antennas were presented to cover2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz for
which are suitable for wireless local area network (WLAN) WLAN applications [7, 8]. These antennas are not very
systems like Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and Bluetooth etc. The antenna compact in size. Thus, there is a demand to design multi-band/
structure is made of two folded strips, coplanar ground plane and dual-band antenna with small size characteristics. TABLE I.
a feed line. The design antenna has been simulated using HFSS shows the comparison of antenna size and operating bands.
software. The proposed antennas shows good simulation results
for impedance bandwidth of 50MHz and 2400MHz for 2.4 GHz
and 5.2 GHz frequency, respectively. II. LAYOUT AND OPERATION
The structure of the antenna is given in Fig. 1. Inexpensive
Keywords—Monopole antenna; wireless local area network and commercially easily available FR4 substrate material is
(WLAN); CPW feed ; Dual-frequency used in this design. The values of relative dielectric constant,
dielectric loss tangent and thickness of material are 4.4, 0.02
I. INTRODUCTION and 1.5 mm, respectively. The proposed antenna model
The ever increasing development of wireless consists of a radiation structure, a coplanar ground plan, and a
communication systems require to increase the data rate, fast feed line. They are printed on the same side of substrate. The
switching and high efficiency to fulfil the need of modern antenna has two monopole arms resonating at dual-band
society[1]. The growing demand for WLAN technology has frequency of 2.4 and 5.2 GHz, respectively. The structure of
led to an interest in integrating the 2.4/5.2 GHz frequencies radiation elements is one folded loop with L-shape. The
into a single device that requires a dual-band antenna. WLAN ground plane consists of two parts which are separated by
antennas have small size, cover multi-band frequency, light transmission line. It is printed in the bottom of substrate. The
weight, wideband frequency band, ease of fabrication and length and widths of ground plane are L1, W1, and W2,
easier to install [2]. Due to space limitation, WLAN system respectively. The CPW transmission line consists of signal
should have multi-band and small antenna size [3]. The strip with size of Wf × Lf is used to fed the antenna. The gap
radiation pattern and impedance bandwidth in multi-band distance between ground plane and transmission line is 0.3
antenna can be improved by reducing the radiation caused by mm. This is the optimized value of gap distance and helps in
current distribution on the ground plane [4]. A lot of research impedance matching. The detailed dimensions of dual-band
has been done on multi-band antenna, where co-planar printed monopole antenna is given in TABLE I.
waveguide (CPW) fed antennas show better behaviour for the The length of the radiation strip is equivalent to the quarter
wireless applications. wavelength to cover lower frequency band of 2.4 GHz (from
point A to point G). The folded loops which contains L-shape
TABLE I. COMPARISON OF PROPOSED ANTENNA PERFORMANCE branch (from point E to point G) is used to generate the higher
frequency band of 5.2 GHz. The structure of the proposed
Published Antenna Size Total Area
Literature (mm2) (mm)
Frequency Bands antenna are designed like folded to make antenna more
Ref [4] 25×25 625 2.4/5.2/5.8GHz compact in size and reduce the coupling effect between them.
Ref [5] 46×20 920 2.4/5GHz
Ref [6] 24×25 600 2.4/5.6GHz TABLE II. PROPOSED ANTENNA PARAMETERS
Ref [7] 26×15 390 2.4/5.2/5.8GHz
Ref [8] 29×16 464 2.4/5.2/5.8GHz Parameter L W Wf Lf g L1 L2
This Work 18×12 216 2.4/5.2/5.8GHz Unit (mm) 12 17.5 2 8.7 0.3 7.9 8.67
Parameter L3 W1 W2 W3 W4 W5 W6
The multi-band MIMO slot antenna for WLAN application Unit (mm) 5.49 4.7 4.7 3.13 2.45 0.75 1
are explained in [5, 6, 9]. These antennas are designed to
cover the different frequencies (2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz) for WLAN
applications. Although, they cover multiband frequency band,

c
978-1-5386-5648-8/18/$31.00 2018 IEEE 198
 W6 W5

W3
L3
W4
L2

W1 W2 L

g
Lf
L1

Wf
W
(a) (b)
Fig. 1. (a) Layout of the design antenna (b) Antenna’s resonating arms
III. SIMULATION RESULTS
The simulation result of return loss for designed antenna is
shown in Fig. 2. It shows that two operating bands are
generated at 2.4 and 5.2 GHz frequency band. The antenna
elements resonated between 2.37 – 2.42 GHz and 4.9 –7.3
GHz with a minimum |S11| < -10 dB. The optimized antenna
shows the impedance bandwidth of about 40 MHz on lower
band of 2.4GHz and about 2.4 GHz on upper band of
5.2/5.8GHz that is compatible with WLAN standard.
Fig. 2. Simulated results of return loss
Simulation result of antenna radiation pattern is shown in
Fig. 3. The radiation pattern is nearly omnidirectional for both
bands. It shows that the antenna gain variation is minimal
within 2.4/ 5.2 GHz frequency bands.
Fig. 3. Simulated 3D radiation pattern for 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz
IV. CONCLUSION
In this work, a dual band compact printed monopole
antenna to radiate at 2.4/5.2 GHz for WLAN application is
designed. The overall size of the antenna is 216 mm3. Antenna
is fed with CPW transmission line. The simulated results
shows that antenna is capable of operating dual-band
frequencies (2.4/5.2 GHz) and satisfy the requirements of
WLAN standard. In the design, the value of return loss is í10
dB or less than that for all frequency bands. The value of
impedance bandwidths is 40 MHz and 2400 MHz at bands of
2.4 and 5.2 GHz, respectively.
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2018 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Antennas and Propagation (APCAP 2018) 199