Design of Compact F-Shaped Slot Triple-Band Antenna for WLAN/WiMAX Applications

This communication presents a small, low-profile planar triple-band microstrip antenna for WLAN/WiMAX applications. The goal of this communication is to combine WLAN and WiMAX communication standards simultaneously into a single device by designing a single antenna that can excite triple-band operation. The designed antenna has a compact size of $19 \times 25\;\text{mm}^{2}$ ($0.152 \lambda_{0}\;\times 0.2 \lambda_{0}$). The proposed antenna consists of F-shaped slot radiators and a defected ground plane. Since only two F-shaped slots are etched on either sides of the radiator for triple-band operation, the radiator is very compact in size and simple in structure. The antenna shows three distinct bands I from 2.0 to 2.76, II from 3.04 to 4.0, and III from 5.2 to 6.0 GHz, which covers entire WLAN (2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz) and WiMAX (2.5/3.5/5.5) bands. To validate the proposed design, an experimental prototype has been fabricated and tested. Thus, the simulation results along with the measurements show that the antenna can simultaneously operate over WLAN (2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz) and WiMAX (2.5/3.5/5.5 GHz) frequency bands.