High efficiency small antenna for WLAN application

In this paper, a small metamaterial antenna with high efficiency is presented. The antenna is proposed for 2.4 GHz Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) application. The metamaterial resonant antenna is designed with a mushroom structure which based on the zeroth order resonant characteristic of a composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH TL). The antenna is designed on the low-cost FR4 substrate with dielectric constant ε_r = 4.4 and tan δ= 0.02. The antenna is simulated and optimized by HFSS 14. The simulation results show that antenna has small size and a good bandwidth with range from 2.40-2.48 GHz for return loss S₁₁ less than -10 dB. The proposed antenna offers high efficiency 72-75% in operation bandwidth. The overall dimension of the antenna is 20.0×22.0×1.6 mm³ including the antenna substrate.