Compact UWB Antenna for Wireless

Personal Area Networks

Ehab K. I. Hamad
Electrical Engineering Department, Aswan Faculty of
Engineering, Aswan University
Aswan 81542, Egypt
e.hamad@ieee.org

Abstract This paper presents a small size ultra wideband

(UWB) antenna for wireless personal area network applications.
The proposed antenna covers the impedance bandwidth of 3.1 to
10.6 GHz frequency range in free space. The design parameters
for achieving optimal performance are investigated. A tapered
microstrip feeding is employed to enhance the antenna matching.
The operation and the characteristics of the proposed antenna
are also analyzed. Good agreement has been obtained between
the simulation and experimental results. The simulated and
measured radiation patterns have demonstrated that the antenna
is nearly omni-directional over the entire band
KeywordsAntennas; Ultrawideband
Wireless personal area networks (WPAN).

I.

(UWB)

antenna;

INTRODUCTION

UWB brings the convenience and mobility of wireless

communications to high speed interconnects in devices
throughout the digital home and office. UWB differs from
other wireless architectures in that it is not restricted to using a
single waveband. It transmits streams of extremely short
energy pulses, typically around 10 to 1,000 picoseconds, which
can be spread across a broad range of frequencies The power
levels needed for UWB are very low, even lower than those for
mobile phones, which is a real advantage when it comes to
mobility and battery life. Added to which the broad frequency
spread makes UWB very resistant to interference. It can also
carry a huge amount of data potential bandwidth is quoted in
hundreds of mega bits per second, making it a lot faster than
Bluetooth at 2 Mbit/s, and the latest 54 Mbit/s Wi-Fi standards.
Security is less of a problem with UWB as the short pulses are
far harder to intercept, but range remains an issue. Signals can
travel no more than around 10 to 20 meters, which effectively
rules UWB out as a rival to the 802.11 WLAN technologies.
With the rapid development of wireless communications, the
requirement of compact and planar antennas are increasingly
stringent due to their attractive features such as low cost,
simple structure, ease of fabrication, wide bandwidth, and
omnidirectional radiation pattern have, which received great
attention for UWB systems.
In recent years, many people are committed to the research
of planar broadband antennas for UWB applications using wide
variety of antenna configurations [1][6]. These antennas have
their own advantages respectively, but there are common
limitations on them that it is difficult to obtain an antenna that

Ahmed H. Radwan
Department of Electronics and Telecommunications,
Polytechnic University of Turin
Turin 10129, Italy
ahm.rad25@gmail.com

is small in size, yet still satisfies the bandwidth requirements

for UWB applications, which is unable to meet needs of the
development of modern wireless communications. Compared
with the three dimensional type of antenna, flat type UWB
antenna printed onto a piece of printed circuit board is a good
option for many applications because it can be easily embedded
into wireless devices or integrated with other microwave
integrated circuits. Ultrawideband is a leading candidate for
short-range, wireless personal area networks, or WPANs. With
this technology, people will be sharing photos, music, video,
data and voice among networked consumer electronics, PCs
and mobile devices throughout the home and even remotely.
For example, users will be able to stream video content from a
PC or consumer electronics (CE) device, such as a camcorder,
DVD player or personal video recorder, to a flat screen HDTV
(high-definition television) display without the use of any
wires. In this application, a wireless universal series bus (WUSB) is required to replace cables and build up high speed
wireless link between personal computers and other devices.
The W-USB has strong demands for high-performance UWB
antennas which will be facing three most challenging issues
namely miniaturized size, reduced ground plane reliance, and
enhanced diversity performance.
For applications in portable systems, compact, radiation
efficient and printed antennas are desired. Slot antennas satisfy
these requirements where wide bandwidth can be obtained by
different techniques. Owing to a balanced structure, a large L
and T shape slots for size reduction are used for bandwidth
enhancement. A CPW fed tapered ring slot antenna which can
achieve a relatively large bandwidth is introduced in [8]. The
wide band slot antenna [9] uses a large aperture and a modified
microstrip feed to create multiple resonances. In another
technique, a rotated slot is proposed in [10], wherein two
modes of closed resonances are excited by a microstrip feed
line. A tapered slot feeding structure is used to transform the
guided waves to free space waves in [11].
In this paper, a design of printed antenna fed by microstrip
line is proposed. It is printed on FR4 dielectric substrate and
fed by a 50 microstrip line with an U-shaped tuning stub on
the opposite side of the substrate. The major parameters affect
the antenna operation are analyzed numerically and
experimentally. The paper is organized in three sections;
literature overview is introduced in the first section followed by
antenna design and parametric study then results are concluded.

978-1-4673-6195-8/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

II.

ANTENNA DESIGN

III.

Our antenna has been designed using two different

softwares; the finite element method-based HFSS software [12]
and the method of moment-based Antenna Design Framework
(ADF) software [13]. Figure 1 shows the schematic diagram of
the proposed antenna. The antenna is structured as a U-shape
radiator fed with a tapered microstrip line to improve the
matching between the mean radiator and the feeding line. An
elliptical slot with a long diameter A and short diameter B is
created within the ground plane underneath the patch for
widening the antenna operating frequency range. The proposed
antenna is printed on an FR4 microwave dielectric substrate
with a thickness of 0.75 mm and a relative permittivity r of
4.4. The major parameters controlling the antenna bandwidth
and affecting its performance are optimized using the EM
simulators. The final optimal dimensions are given in Table 1.
The overall size of the antenna is 30 mm 30 mm.
TABLE I.

Parametric study has been conducted to optimize the design

of the antenna. This study is crucial as it gives approximation
measure before antenna fabrication can be done. The
performance of U-shaped UWB antenna characteristic depends
on number of parameters, the distance (S), the tapering angle
(), the inner radius (r) and the outer radius (R), which are
shown in Fig. 1.
A. Distance (S)
The simulated reflection coefficient of the proposed
antenna for various S are illustrated in Fig. 2. The distance (S)
tells how much the U-shape is centered within the ellipticalshape etched from the ground. As can be observed, it affects
significantly the antenna performance. It is seen that the curves
for different S have variation trend, but the optimal distance
which can provide a widest -10 dB bandwidth is S = 1.5 mm.

THE OPTIMIZED DIMENSIONS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA

25 mm

16 mm

6 mm

7 mm

2.7 mm

Wf

Lf

2.2 mm

7 mm

2.5 mm

PARAMETRIC STUDY AND RESULTS

1.5 mm

16

Fig. 2: Effects of the distance (S)

B. Tapering angle ()
In Fig. 3, the return loss of the proposed antenna for
different tapering angles are shown. It is observed that the
value of the tapering angle strongly affects the antenna
reflection coefficient, especially at lower frequencies. The
optimal tapering angle is found to be at = 16o, with a
bandwidth of 8.4 GHz (from 3.2 GHz to 10.7 GHz).

Fig. 1: Schematic diagram and prototype photograph of the proposed

U-Shaped antenna.

Fig. 3: Effect of the diffraction angle

C. Inner radius (r)

The effect of the inner radius (r) on the antenna
performance is shown in Fig. 4. It can be noticed that the
reflection coefficient improvement shifts towards the lower
frequencies as the inner radius (r) increases. To achieve the
maximum possible bandwidth, the optimum value for the inner
radius is selected to be 2.5 mm.

Fig. 7: Voltage standing wave ratio, VSWR

Fig. 4: Effect of the inner radius.

D. Outer radius (R)

Figure 5 shows that the outer radius R is a very critical
parameter on the antenna impedance bandwidth. By increasing
the radius (R), the antenna bandwidth increases as well
especially at lower frequency band. It can be seen that the
optimized value for the outer radius is R = 6 mm.

Fig. 5: Effect of the outer radius.

Fig. 6: Simulated and measured return loss of the proposed antenna.

Based on the above parametric study, the optimized antenna

is designed. The measured and calculated return loss of the
proposed antenna are illustrated in Fig. 6. The antenna yields a
calculated impedance bandwidth of about 105 % (3.2-10.4
GHz) almost covering the whole UWB frequency bandwidth
while the measured impedance bandwidth is about 117 % (3.312.7 GHz). The simulated results are in good agreement with
the measured data as illustrated in Fig. 6. The simulated and
measured VSWR is depicted in Fig. 7, which satisfies a less
than 2 over the while interested frequency band. The simulated
antenna gain varies from 3.4 dB to 5.6 dB over the operating
frequency range as shown in Fig. 8. Figure 9 shows the
radiation characteristics of the proposed antenna. Both yz-cut
plane (E-plane) and xz-cut plane (H-plane) radiation patterns
have been simulated and measured in an anechoic chamber at
three resonant frequencies 3, 7.5, and 10 GHz. From the
measured results, the proposed antenna has omni-directional
radiation pattern in H-plane at lower frequency (3 GHz) and
near omni-directional at higher frequencies (7.5 and 10 GHz)
with good agreement with simulations. The measured E-plane
radiation patterns agrees well with the simulation results;
especially at lower frequency (3 GHz). While there are some
ripples and discrepancies in the measured radiation patterns at
the higher frequencies (7.5 and 10 GHz) which may be due to
sensitivity and accuracy of the measuring devices at higher
frequencies in additions to the effects of the SMA feed
connector and coaxial cables at these frequencies.

Fig. 8: Simulated peak gain of proposed antenna

3 GHz

7 .5GHz

10 GHz

3 GHz

7.5 GHz

10 GHz

B
Fig. 9: Measured co-pol (blue solid line), cross-pol (red dashed line), simulated co-pol (green dash-dotted line) and cross-pol (magenta dotted line),
(a) E-plane and (b) H-plane radiation patterns of the proposed antenna.

IV.

CONCLUSION

A printed U-shape monopole antenna fed by tapered

microstrip line for UWB WPAN is presented. The antenna
performance in terms of the radiation pattern and reflection
coefficients have been investigated in this paper. The major
parameters affecting the antenna performance have been
extensively analyzed. The antenna has also been confirmed to
be nearly omni-directional over the entire bandwidth. The
simulated; using two different commercial EM simulators and
measured results of the proposed antenna are matched well.
Besides, these features, the antenna have a simple structure
with small size, which is beneficial for system integration such
as WPAN applications.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Erasmus Mundus for
supporting this work and Mr. Matteo Francevillo for his
assistance in the fabrication and testing of the antenna.
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