An Octagonal Iterative Fractal Antenna with Notch Band and UWB Characteristics

In this paper, based on the rectangular iterative technique, we propose an omnidirectional UWB fractal antenna by using microstrip line as feed. The antenna takes regular octagonal shape as patch element. Meanwhile, the iterative fractal and notch technique has been adopted to optimize the UWB antenna performance. After multiple iterations of the configured octagonal patch element, the optimized UWB performance can be obtained. The simulation results reveal that the operating bandwidth of the antenna meets Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broadband standard. Moreover, in order to avoid the electromagnetic interference in the X-band identified by the IEEE 521-2002 standard, we further adopt notch techniques and add the U-shaped gap to the microstrip line to achieve electromagnetic shielding. The impedance matching has been achieved for the antenna by imposing the slot on the ground. After optimizing the slot structure, the reflection of the antenna has reduced in the whole operating frequency band. The overall size of the ultra-wideband fractal antenna was designed to $25 \times 35 mm^{2}$ and was composed of FR-4 material with the relative dielectric constant $\varepsilon_{r} = 4.4$ and loss tangent angle $\tan \theta = 0.02$. After optimization, the antenna has good impedance matching and meets the UWB antenna omnidirectional standard. In 3.1–15.4GHz (excluding X-band), and the reflection coefficient S
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is lower than -10 dB, voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) is less than 2, maximum gain reaches 6dB. The results indicated that our proposed fractal antenna is promising for UWB antenna applications.