A wideband stacked microstrip patch antenna design with augmented gain-bandwidth product for 5G wireless applications

Abstract

Over the years, increasing demand of microstrip patch antennas have made them desirable prospects for applications in the wireless communications field. The rise in popularity is attributed to their miniature sizes, thereby proving effectiveness in the fabrication process. Despite all these features, major drawback of these structures is narrow bandwidth, that can be enhanced moderately using procedures like increasing patch width, substrate thickness reduction, slot introduction within patch and substrate selection with comparatively lesser dielectric constant. However, incorporating these methods alongside stacked arrangement causes significant enhancement in their bandwidths alongwith radiation pattern improvements. Keeping above advantages in mind, a stacked antenna is proposed in this paper that generates a broad impedance bandwidth (47.62%) for designated frequency range in S-band region (2–4 GHz). This arrangement typically comprises of a triple-layer arrangement with intermediate Rogers-RT/duroid-5880 substrate-layer having relatively lower dielectric constant (2.2). This is surrounded by double FR4 substrate-layers to comply with the stacked arrangement. Besides broad bandwidth, wide radiation intensity of 18 dB is achieved which is perfectly symmetrical. Furthermore, a very healthy gain of 6.17 dB is recorded at resonant frequency (2.625 GHz), with augmented gain-bandwidth-product (GBP) of 2650 MHz which facilitates broad bandwidth generation. The suggested design could prove to be useful in wireless applications like radar, Wi-Fi and 5G-network based implementations.