Antenna design for advance wireless systems using metamaterial surfaces

This paper presents a comparative study of the performance of a 2.4GHz microstrip patch antenna, using various metamaterial surfaces, each working as a ground plane for the proposed antenna. A 1.6 mm thicker Rogers RT/ Duroid 5880 is used as a substrate material in the design of the antenna. The relative permittivity of the substrate is 2.2. The conventional patch antenna is properly matched to 50 ohms, using an inset-feed mechanism. The gain of the 2.4 GHz patch antenna backed by a conventional ground plane is 7.21dBi. The antenna is then backed by three different types of metamaterial surfaces, Frequency Selective Surface (FSS), Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) surface and Artificial Magnetic Conductor Surface (AMC) and their performances are compared and quantified in terms of gain. It is found that the AMC based patch antenna gives the highest gain (9.01dBi) among the used surfaces. It is also found that the surface waves are suppressed relatively more by the FSS ground plane. The artificial surfaces improve the efficiency of the conventional patch antenna due to their high-impedance characteristics, which helps in reducing the losses with in the substrate material. Simulations are performed in High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS).