A wideband planar surface wave antenna for the WLAN router

In this paper, a wideband planar surface wave antenna for the 5 GHz wireless local area network (WLAN) router applications is proposed. The antenna is excited by a center-fed circular patch with an annular ring patch (ARP) and a thin dielectric slab with periodic circular patches (PCPs) is loaded on the circular patch radiator. A prototype of the 0.3-mm-thick (0.06λ)(0.06λ) antenna was constructed and tested to evaluate its suitability for reducing router thickness. The impedance bandwidth of the antenna was 23.6% (5.7–7.1 GHz) and its average gain was 5.91 dB. The radiation pattern of the antenna was nearly omnidirectional.