Analysis, design and implementation of an enhanced metamaterial-based antenna for wireless applications

Abstract

The recent growth in mobile communication technologies has pushed telecommunication companies to support several wireless standards and mobile services on the same device. Moreover, the utilization of electronic devices which contain high-frequency components is now an integral part of today life. For instance, the current hand-held devices and wireless transceivers require multiple components like antennas, filters, mixers, power dividers and couplers to co-exist together within a small space. These devices will become more compact and size-efficient. As the antenna is considered the most challenging component to be integrated in microwave devices, the demand for low-profile, planar and multi-band antennas are drawing notable attention in current wireless devices. Microstrip patch antennas are one of the most popular antenna structures that are characterized by their light weight, small volume and ease of fabrication. The introduction of electromagnetic metamaterials offers to microwave engineers a degree of freedom to combat challenges arising with the aforementioned trend. The use of metamaterials has opened the possibility to realize novel microwave devices such as zero-index lenses, miniaturized resonant antennas and multi-band antennas. In this thesis, we propose and investigate the use of metamaterials in the design of frequency-reconfigurable and multi-band antennas, and in the design of antennas with enhanced gain. The used metamaterial particles are based on single ring and dual-ring Split-Ring Resonators (SRRs), which are composite metallic structures printed on dielectric substrates. Parametric analysis of these SRRs has been performed. Then, the multi-band and frequency-reconfigurable metamaterial-based antenna is proposed. In this design, the SRRs are positioned in close proximity to the antenna patch in order to operate as resonating elements and provide multi-band functionality. In the reconfigurable case, switching elements are installed over the SRRs to control their resonances. On the other h