1738
14, 2015
Electrically Small Metamaterial-Inspired Tri-Band
Antenna With Meta-Mode
Cheng Zhu, Member, IEEE, Tong Li, Ke Li, Zi-Jian Su, Xin Wang, Hui-Qing Zhai, Member, IEEE,
Long Li, Senior Member, IEEE, and Chang-Hong Liang, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Two novel metamaterial-inspired antennas applied
for 4G mobile communication are proposed in this letter. Antenna
1 takes a triangular electromagnetic resonator (TER) as its radi-
ator fed by a coplanar waveguide (CPW). After the model building
and simulation, three frequency bands of GHz,
GHz and GHz are achieved. Each
band is well matched except for the band 3. Therefore, Antenna 2
is further developed, which adds a complementary TER (CTER)
on the ground, and the improved design has a good impedance
matching in band 3 without influencing the first two bands. Both
antennas have operational bands covering WiMAX in 1.8/3.5 GHz
and WLAN in 5.8 GHz and omnidirectional radiation patterns
during the operating bands. The proposed two metamaterials an-
tennas have the advantages of simple fabrication, miniaturization
and compactness, which can be applied to the 4G wireless mobile
communication system.
Index Terms—Coplanar waveguide (CPW), meta-mode, meta-
material-inspired antenna, triangular elctromagnetic resonator
(TER).
I. INTRODUCTION
N OWADAYS, extensive researchers in the field of wire-
less communication have concentrated their research
on the multiband microstrip antenna, which could be applied
in 4G mobile communication, multiple-input–multiple-output
(MIMO) systems, bluetooth system, as well as wireless power
transfer. Compared to conventional antennas (e.g., horn an-
tenna or Yagi–Uda antenna), microstrip antennas [1]–[4] have
advantages of light weight and low profile and allow easy inte-
gration with surface-mount devices, which are more promising
and flexible in dual-band or tri-band operations.
The conventional approach to realize a multi-band antenna
is to design multi resonators to obtain several distinctive radi-
ation mode. For example, a dual-band RHCP antenna was de-
signed using proximity-fed stacked patch with quadrature phase
feeding [1]. By etching slots (e.g., L-shaped or I-shaped slots)
on the surface of a printed inverted “F” antenna (PIFA), the
PIFA can be operated in three frequency bands [2]. Also, A
Manuscript received March 17, 2015; accepted April 06, 2015. Date of pub-
lication April 08, 2015; date of current version September 16, 2015. This work
was supported in part by the National High Technology Research and Develop-
ment Program of China (863 Program) under Grant No. 2012AA01A308; the
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Contracts No. 61401335,
No. 61101066, and No. 51477126; the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in
Shaanxi Province of China under Grant No. 2014JQ8352; and the Fundamental
Research Funds for the Central Universities.
The authors are with the National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology
on Antennas and Microwaves, School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian Uni-
versity, Xi’an 710071, China (e-mail: hala36@126.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2015.2421356
1536-1225 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.
compact tri-band planar monopole antenna could be achieved
by employing reactive loading and a “defected” ground-plane
structure [3]. Besides, fractal geometry could be introduced into
the tri-band antenna design [4].
Split ring resonator (SRR) and complementary SRR (CSRR),
providing the magnetic response (mu-negative, MNG) and elec-
tric response (epsilon-negative, ENG) respectively, are essential
parts to constitute the left-handed metamaterial (LHM). And
they have been widely adopted in various kinds of multiband
antenna design to increase the number of working frequency
point and shrink the size of antenna [5]–[8]. Based on the pre-
vious research, triangular electromagnetic resonator (TER) [9]
is a kind of typical metamaterials with electric and magnetic re-
sponse at distinct frequency regime, which also be applied into
the antenna design.
In this letter, two novel triband metamaterial antennas are
proposed with TER and CTER. With one TER unit as a radi-
ator in the monopole design, Antenna 1 operates in three bands
at 1.8/3.5/5.8 GHz (band 1, band 2, and band 3), which cover
the desired bands for WLAN and WiMAX applications. In An-
tenna 2, an additional CTER etched on the ground is employed
to improve the impendence matching of band 3, without influ-
encing first two bands of Antenna 1. The experiments are oper-
ated to demonstrate the effectiveness and validation of the pro-
posed two antennas.
II. ANTENNA DESIGN AND ANALYSIS
Antenna 1 (With TER Loading): The structure of Antenna 1 is
shown in Fig. 1(a) and the antenna simply consists of a TER ra-
diator and CPW feeding line. The radiating element is the TER
which is printed on a dielectric substrate with relative permit-
tivity of 2.65 and thickness of 1 mm. The overall dimension is
mm . The antennas have an operational band cov-
ering the WiMAX/WLAN and they are fed by a CPW which
can be easily integrated with the patch on the same side of the
substrate. The CPW is connected to the coaxial cable through
a 50- SMA connector. All the structures are simulated by
using ANSYS HFSS based on the finite-element method (FEM).
Since all the triangles in the designs are equilateral triangles and
the head of the lower triangle overlap some parts of its head with
the feeding line, so the horizontal side length of the lower tri-
angle is 17 mm and mm.
The main dimensions of Antenna 1 are listed in Table I. After
parameters sweep and structure optimization, Antenna 1 can
operate in three bands which are also shown in Fig. 1. The
operate bands can cover 1.8/3.5-GHz WiMAX and 5.8 GHz
WLAN. Comparing with S11 of a conventional monopole an-
tenna, two additional operational bands are achieved for An-
tenna 1. In order to adjust the impendence matching of An-
tenna 1, the width of CPW feed line and the dimensions of the
ZHU et al.: ELECTRICALLY SMALL METAMATERIAL-INSPIRED TRI-BAND ANTENNA WITH META-MODE
Fig. 1. (a) Schematic diagram of Antenna 1 (with TER loading). (b) Simulated
and measured S11 of antenna 1.
TABLE I
DIMENSIONS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA 1 (UNITS: mm)
TER are all optimized. However, band 3 could not be ideally
adjusted compared with the first two bands.
To further investigate the working mechanism of three bands
of antenna 1, surface current distributions at different frequen-
cies are given in Fig. 2. Previously in our letter, the characteristic
of TER has been carefully discussed [9]. As shown in Fig. 2(a),
the lowest mode (electric response) of TER has the strongest
current on its center axis, which is very similar with the cur-
rent distribution in band 1. So, we could alternately understand
band 1 of Antenna 1 is the result of electric response, also known
as the meta-mode. Moreover, the band 2 and band 3 are formed
by the excitation of larger and smaller triangle of TER, respec-
tively, which could also be observed from Fig. 2.
Besides, according to our previous research results [9], we
can obtain the equivalent circuit of TER from the surface cur-
rent distribution and then the equivalent inductor (L) and equiv-
alent capacitor (C) could be obtained by geometric dimensions
from formulae. Similarly, the equivalent circuit model of pro-
posed antenna could also be obtained by surface current distri-
bution of the monopole radiator at different frequencies. After
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Fig. 2. Surface current distribution and equivalent circuit model. (a) TER.
(b) Antenna 1 at 1.8 GHz. (c) Antenna 1 at 3.0 GHz. (d) Antenna 1 at 5.8 GHz.
(a) TER and its equivalent circuit [9].
the equivalent circuit is obtained, the working frequency of the
proposed antenna could be calculated by
(1)
It should be noted that the coupling between the TER and
CPW feeding line is not considered in the formula above, which
only allow us to obtain the approximate . In order to get more
accurate resonant frequency and fully account for the coupling
effect, it is necessary to optimize the antenna by full-wave sim-
ulation in HFSS.
In order to find the influences on the resonant frequencies
with different structural parameters, a parametric study has been
carried out. By alerting and fixing other
parameters, the simulated S11 of Antenna 1 is shown in Fig. 3.
As the value of varies from 4 mm to 6 mm while the value of
a1 maintains to be 16 mm. The center frequency of the Band 3
decreases with the increase of and the other two bands remain
stable. Band 1 slightly changes towards the lower frequency as
the middle line of TER increase a little as increases, which
could be judged by the surface distribution in Fig. 2. Therefore,
the operating bands of antenna 1 could be easily adjusted by
altering some parameters.
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Fig. 3. Effects of variation of different on the performances of the
antenna 1.
Fig. 4. (a) Schematic diagram of Antenna 2 (with TER and CTER loading).
(b) Simulated and measured S11 of antenna 2.
Antenna 2(with TER and CTER Loading): Since the input
impedance ( ) of Antenna 1 in the third band is not
well matched to , the reflection coefficient is not good as
compared with the first two bands. Therefore, CTER is intro-
duced to Antenna 2 to change the current distribution and also
the input impedance. The results show that the third band of An-
tenna 2 is better matched than that of Antenna 1.
According to the Babinet Principle, the L of complementary
TER (CTER) corresponds to the C of TER and also the C of
CTER corresponds to the L of TER. So we can still use the for-
mula (1) to design the geometry of CTER so as to let it resonate
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 14, 2015
Fig. 5. Surface current distribution of Antenna 2 at band 3.
Fig. 6. The real part and imaginary part of impedance of Antenna 1 and
Antenna 2.
TABLE II
DIMENSIONS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA 2 (UNITS: mm)
at the third frequency. By adding CTER in Antenna 1, the struc-
ture of Antenna 2 is obtained as shown in Fig. 4(a). The CTER is
directly printed on the left part of the ground. The introduction
of CTER in Antenna 2 is used to change the current distribu-
tion on the ground and try to make a better impedance match
for band 3.
The simulated and measured S11 of Antenna 2 are shown in
Fig. 4(b). The first and second band of Antenna 1 are kept in
Antenna 2, meanwhile, Band 3 in Antenna 1 is improved to a
better match effect. All the dimensions of Antenna 2 are the
same with Antenna 1 except for CTER, of which the dimensions
are mm, mm, and mm.
From Fig. 5, the current has been rearranged due to the pres-
ence of CTER and then the impedance matching is further im-
proved. In Fig. 6, the real parts of impedance of antenna 1 and
antenna 2 are highly similar. However, the imaginary parts of
impedance of antenna 1 and antenna 2 are also similar except
for band 3. The reactance of antenna 2 goes near zero while the
reactance of antenna 1 stay positive in the regime of band 3.
Since the CTER is capacitive due to the excitation of external
electric field, the reactance of antenna 2 has the value near zero
which improve the impedance matching of band 3 in antenna 2,
which is shown in Fig. 6.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
After the optimization and fabrication, the photo the two
antennas is shown in Fig. 7. Furthermore, the measured and
ZHU et al.: ELECTRICALLY SMALL METAMATERIAL-INSPIRED TRI-BAND ANTENNA WITH META-MODE
Fig. 7. Photograph of proposed Antenna 1 and Antenna 2.
Fig. 9. Measured (solid line) and simulated (dotted line) radiation patterns for
Fig. 8. Measured (solid black line) and simulated (short dash red line) radiation
Antenna 2 at (a) 1.8 GHz, (b) 3.5 GHz, and (c) 5.8 GHz.
patterns of Antenna 1 at (a) 1.8 GHz and (b) 3.5 GHz.
simulated E-plane and H-plane radiation patterns of the pro-
posed Antenna 1 and Antenna 2 at resonant frequencies are
shown in Fig. 7 and 8. It can be seen that the measured results
are good agreement with simulated results. From the results
above, it is observed that both antennas have stable omnidi-
rectional radiation pattern in H-plane and 8-shape radiation
pattern in the E-plane. Besides, compared with Antenna 1, the
E-plane radiation patterns of three bands of Antenna 2 have
a little asymmetry, which is the result of adding the structure
of CTER, but that asymmetry doesn’t influence the radiation
performance of Antenna 2.
IV. CONCLUSION
Two compact, planar, and CPW-fed triple band antenna in-
spired by TER with/without CTER has been designed, fabri-
cated, and measured. Antenna 1 covers two frequency bands
corresponding to WiMax and WLAN. By loading CTER into
Antenna 2, a better impedance matching is obtained at band 3
without influencing band 1 and band 2. Both antennas show an
omnidirectional radiation pattern for WLAN and WiMAX fre-
quency bands. The proposed two antennas have the advantage of
simple structure and easy fabrication and they could be widely
applied in different 4G wireless devices.
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