Design of a wideband planar volcano-smoke slot antenna (PVSA) for wireless communications

This paper presents a novel antenna design, referred to as the planar volcano-smoke slot antenna (PVSA), useful for wideband wireless communication applications. The antenna is a planar slot with an appearance reminiscent of a volcanic crater and puff of smoke and is fed by a coplanar waveguide (CPW) to achieve wide bandwidth. A coax-to-CPW transition, which is crucial for achieving wide bandwidth performance, is modeled and introduced into the antenna, and the effect of slot variations on antenna bandwidth is investigated. It is demonstrated that the optimized PVSA has an impedance bandwidth of 125% (for a VSWR < 2) at the center frequency of 3.7 GHz.