A Wideband Dual-Band Metamaterial loaded antenna for Wireless Applications

A compact wideband multiband antenna designed to resonate at 2.4GHz and 5.2GHz is proposed in this paper. The proposed antenna is basically a monopole rectangular patch which is designed to operate at 5GHz. This basic structure is modified by introducing meta-material based inter digital capacitor (IDC) reactive loading that exhibits dual band characteristics at 2.3GHz and 5.26GHz respectively. A bandwidth of above 1.4GHz at the two resonant frequencies is obtained. The compact size of the proposed antenna is 0.3067λ0×0.345λ0 where λ0 is calculated at first resonance. The antenna is etched on a FR4 substrate with dielectric constant εr=4.4 and thickness of 1.6mm. The simulated results exhibit considerable gain and wide impedance bandwidth at the resonant frequencies. The monopole like radiation patterns are obtained at both the operating frequencies. The designed antenna is found applications in WLAN and Wi-MAX wireless communications.