Design of a Compact High Gain Microstrip Patch Antenna for Tri-Band 5 G Wireless Communication

Abstract

In this paper, a Tri-band microstrip-line-fed low profile microstrip patch antenna is proposed for future multi-band 5 G wireless communication applications. The proposed antenna is printed on a compact Rogers RT5880 substrate of dimensions 20×16.5×0.508 mm³ with relative permittivity, ε_r of 2.2 and loss tangent, tan δ of 0.0009. To improve return loss and bandwidth of the proposed antenna, a partial ground plane technique is employed. The proposed antenna operates at 10, 28, and 38 GHz, three of the selected frequencies which are allocated by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for 5 G mobile communications. To reduce interference between the 5 G system and other systems in the band, a pair of T-shaped slots is etched in the radiating patch to reject unwanted frequency bands. The proposed design provides a gain of 5.67 dB at 10 GHz, 9.33 dB at 28 GHz and 9.57 dB at 38 GHz; the radiation pattern is mostly directional. The proposed antenna is designed and optimized using two commercial 3D full-wave software, viz. CST microwave studio and Ansoft HFSS. A prototype of the designed antenna that was fabricated and showed good agreement between the actual measurements of S11 & VSWR and the simulation results using both software.