Design of edge fed microstrip patch array antenna configurations for WiMAX

Recently, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), has been demonstrated to have its strong potential to provide a very high speed of broadband services. By simultaneously using multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver sites, these systems exploit the spatial dimension of the propagation channel. The development of such antennas includes the design of antenna array, optimizing the antenna array parameters and thereby increasing its performance. This paper mainly focuses on design of single microstrip patch antennae and linear array configurations by optimizing the various antenna parameters such as directivity, gain, Mutual coupling and beamwidth etc., Microstrip array antennae designed and simulated using IE3D for WiMAX application at 2.4GHz operating frequency and the same configurations are also optimized. In this analysis, upon comparing the parameters such as gain, directivity, return loss and 3-dB beamwidth quantitatively, it is proposed that the linear array promises very narrow beamwidth with optimized gain.