Design and Analysis of μ-Negative Material Loaded Wideband Electrically Compact Antenna for WLAN/WiMAX Applications

A compact tri-band antenna incorporated with a split ring resonator array is proposed for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and Worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) applications. The proposed antenna is printed on an FR4 substrate with overall dimensions of 0.25.x0.29. at the lowest frequency. Impedance bandwidth of the antenna is optimised by introducing slots on the top of the patch. The ground plane is engineered by placement of a split ring resonators array to induce additional resonance due to occurance of magnetic dipole moment. The antenna resonates at the frequencies of 2.4GHz, 3.5 GHz & 5.5GHz having bandwidths of 12.5%, 7.42% and 6.36% with the gains of 2.25 dBi, 3.72 dBi and 2.71 dBi, respectively which matches well with the fabricated results. The proposed antenna shows omnidirectional radiation pattern which makes it appropriate for WLAN and WiMAX applications.