Design of a compact U-shaped slot triple band antenna for WLAN/WiMAX applications

This article presents a small, low-profile planar microstrip antenna that is applicable for both WLAN and WiMAX applications. The goal of this paper is to design an antenna which can excite triple-band operation with appreciable impedance bandwidth to combine WLAN/WiMAX communication specifications simultaneously in one device. The designed antenna has a compact size of 10 × 26 mm2. The proposed antenna consists of an inverted U-shaped slot radiator and a defected ground plane. Overall the design method and parametric study found appropriate dimensions, which provides three distinct bands I from 2.40 to 2.52, II from 3.40 to 3.60 and III from 5.00 to 6.00 GHz that covers entire WLAN (2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz) and WiMAX (2.5/3.5/5.5) bands. Finally, a prototype antenna was fabricated and experimentally characterized to verify the design concept as well as to validate the simulation results. Thus the simulation results along with the measurements show that the antenna can simultaneously operate over WLAN and WiMAX frequency bands.