Evolutionary Design of a Wide Band Flat Wire Antenna for WLAN and Wi-Fi Applications

This paper presents a wire antenna for multi-band WLAN application, having a very simple geometry, designed using the Structure-Based Evolutionary Programming; an innovative antenna design technique, based on evolutionary programming. The chosen fitness function includes far-field requirements, as well as wideband input matching specifications. The latter requirements, which must be present in every useful antenna design, allow to stabilize the algorithm and to design both optimal and robust antennas. The antenna has been analysed with NEC-2 during the evolutionary process and the outcome of the procedure shows a very good performance; with a -10dB bandwidth that covers the required frequencies for multi-band WLAN applications (2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz) and beyond, and an end-fire gain greater than 10 dB. The NEC-2 results have been also compared to the ones obtained by a well-assessed, general purpose, 3D electromagnetic software, HFSS by Ansys, showing a very good agreement.