Design and analysis of meta-material based WLAN antenna

In this paper, a 2.42 GHz micro-strip patch antenna is designed and analyzed using a conventional and a metamaterial (artificial) based Electromagnetic Bandgap (EBG) ground planes. The directivity, return loss and VSWR of the conventional 2.42 GHz patch antenna were found to be 5.23dB, -13.2dB, and 1.5 respectively. The proposed antenna then being mounted on a Mushroom-type EBG structures (artificial ground plane) produced better far-field performance as compared to conventional counterpart i.e. the return loss, directivity and VSWR were improved by 80.3%, 58.5% and 24.6%. The WLAN antenna was designed and tested on a miniaturized slotted EBG structure. The slotted EBG was 11.4 % compact as compared to the mushroom structure. The directivity, return loss and VSWR of the antenna using the slotted EBG are improved by be 51%, 31.8%, 15.4% respectively as compared to the patch conventional WLAN patch antenna. The antenna can be used for WLAN applications