A bandwidth and gain enhancement for microstrip antenna based on metamaterial

An ameliorated ultrawide band (UWB) and high-gain microstrip antenna based on planar metamaterial is presented and discussed in this paper. The proposed antenna with a compact size of 32x28x0.794mm(3) has mesh-shaped patch and patterned ground plane with crossed strip gaps. By means of novel planar metamaterial structure, impedance bandwidth and gain own a significant improvement. The simulations show that the antenna has a super-wide band (less than -10dB), from 3.06GHz to 36.4GHz, covering the entire UWB frequency band (from 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz) set by FCC. Within the operating band of concern, the antenna gain can reach as high as 8.02dB. Due to the surface wave coming from the patterned patch and ground plane, the antenna presents end-fire directional radiation in the higher frequency region. To validate the simulation results, a prototype is fabricated and measured. And the measured results are in good agreement with the simulation results. It is obvious that advantages mentioned above will enable the proposed antenna to be well applied in the short-range wireless communication system.