Miniaturized CPW-Fed Planar Monopole Antenna for Multi-band WLAN/WiMAX Wireless Applications

Abstract

To incorporate two different communication standards in a single device, a miniaturized dual-band planar monopole antenna is presented in this paper. The proposed antenna is formed by a CPW feed line and a rectangular ring monopole with a vertical strip. The designed antenna has a small overall size of 19 mm  36 mm  1.6 mm. A prototype of the proposed antenna which was fabricated and measured to validate the design shows a good agreement between the simulation and the experiment. The measured results indicate that the antenna has the impedance bandwidths of 650 MHz (2.30-2.95 GHz) and 2460 MHz (3.40-5.86 GHz) at the first and second bands, respectively with a reflection coefficient less than – 10 dB covering all the WLAN bands (2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz) and WiMAX bands (2.6/3.5/5.5 GHz). In addition, the nearly omni-directional and bi-directional radiation patterns are also achieved in both H- and E-planes, respectively. It is also noticeable that a good antenna gain over both operating bands has been obtained. Therefore, this simple compact planar monopole antenna with multi-band characteristics is well suitable for WLAN and WiMAX wireless communication applications. Details of the proposed antenna design and both simulated and experimental results are analyzed and discussed.