A Compact Plus Shaped Carpet Fractal Antenna with an I-Shaped DGS for C-band/X-band/UWB/WIBAN applications

This article presents the design and development of a compact broadband “+” shaped aperture coupled carpet fractal antenna with a defected ground structure (I shaped slot in the ground) for broadband/ultra wideband (UWB) and a multiband characteristics. The antenna has overall dimensions of 8.4 cm × 5.5 cm × 3.2 mm and is fed using aperture coupled feeding mechanism. It shows an impedance bandwidth (< 10 dB) of 4460 MHz from 6.93 to 11.39 GHz with fractional bandwidth of 0.48 at the center resonant frequency of 9.16 GHz. A multiband behavior is also exhibited by this antenna from 3.9–4.08 GHz, 4.8–5.06 GHz and 6.1–6.4 GHz with impedance bandwidths of 180 MHz, 260 MHz and 300 MHz respectively. It therefore supports the wireless applications of Wi-MAX (3.8–4.1 GHz), Wi-BAN/long distance radio telecommunication (4.8–5.06 GHz), wireless sensor networks (6.1–6.4 GHz), satellite (7.4–7.8 GHz) and UWB (6.9–11.03 GHz). The antenna is designed as a ‘+’ shaped patch with fractal rectangular slots cut out from it up to iterations of second order that allow the antenna to support multiband characteristics. The bandwidth at these bands is improved by using I shaped defected ground structure (DGS) and a parasitic feeding method i.e. aperture coupled feeding (Karur et al., in: ICMARS (IEEE), Jodhpur, India, pp. 266–270, 2014).The antenna has a compact structure with two layers of FR4 substrate, the ‘+’ shaped carpet fractal printed on the upper substrate layer and the lower substrate has a ground layer printed on its top and feed line on its bottom layer respectively. It shows a simulated peak gain of 4 dB at an operation frequency of 7.95 GHz. The antenna design and simulations are done using CST MWS V14. The Simulation results in terms of impedance bandwidth, smith chart, gain are presented in this article. To validate the impedance bandwidth results, the proposed carpet fractal antenna is experimentally tested using a vector network analyzer and the measured results are found to be closely matching with the simulated ones, allowing the antenna to be practically suitable for the afore mentioned wireless applications.