Conformal patch fed stacked triangular dielectric resonator antenna for WLAN applications

A Stacked triangular dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) fed by a conformal patch is proposed for WLAN applications. In this paper, triangular shaped three resonators with same dielectric constant and different sizes are stacked to improve the gain, bandwidth and radiation performances of DRA. An increase in bandwidth is further achieved by using air gaps. This Stacked DRA is excited by a conformal patch connected to a microstrip line which is an effective feed mechanism to obtain wideband operation and is more efficient in energy coupling than other types of feeding techniques. This stacked triangular DRA is simulated using a CST microwave studio suite™ 2010. The simulated results show that the proposed DRA achieves an impedance bandwidth of about 41% for VSWR less than 2, covering a frequency range from 4.0 GHz to 6.02 GHz. Its maximum gain is 7.98 dBi. The proposed antenna is suitable for wireless local area networks (WLAN) applications in 5-6 GHz frequency range. This stacked DRA exceeds the bandwidth requirements for the IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network (WLAN) applications (in the frequency range 5.15-5.35 GHz and 5.725-5.825 GHz) within a 2:1 VSWR. Parametric studies of the antennas with CST microwave based design data and simulated results are presented here.