Design and simulation of fractal-based ring antennas for 5G wireless communications

Abstract

After the rolling-out of 5G communication systems the development of smaller and more effective components is still ongoing since it is always important to keep up with the development of the technology, therefore smaller compact and easy-to-fabricate components are the main aim of the scientific community these days. Since the 5G systems are somehow smaller than the old systems' components it arises the fact that the newly- designed components have to have space limitations during the design stages. In this work, by focusing on two of the main 5G bands which are the bands centered on 3.5 GHz and 7GHz three types of antennas were designed and implemented by using CST Microwave studio simulator. The antennas were designed using the fractal concept, characterized by space-filling and self-similarity, so there is no need for extra space when we already have a limited one. The design of the first antenna started by designing a cut-angles rectangular patch antenna that propagates at 3.5 GHz, then by copying and then scaling down the same patch and later subtracting it from the main patch we got a single ring cut-angles rectangular patch antenna that propagates at 3.5 GHz with a reflection coefficient of -19 dB and a gain of 2dBi. The second antenna was created by scaling down the full ring of the first antenna and creating a similar inner ring that propagates at 7 GHz center frequency and has a bandwidth between 6.25-8.1 GHz, this antenna can propagate at two different 5G frequency bands centered at 3.5 GHz and 7 GHz respectively. This antenna has a reflection coefficient S11 of around -20 dB for both bands' resonant frequencies and a gain of 2.29 dBi and 2.51 dBi for the two bands at their center frequency. All these antennas have a microstrip feeding line with a length of 16 mm which is equal to something around λ/4 of the first band's center frequency, all the antennas have an FR-4 substrate thickness of 1 mm and a width of the feeding line of 1.6 mm so that together they provide a 50-ohm impedance at the input port which assure that most of the input port's waves are being propagated. Finally, to increase the gain a 4x1 antenna array was designed to propagate at the same bands, this array has two feeding ports that are designed in an inverted way to improve the matching between the array elements, each port is connected to only two propagating elements by a tree-shaped λ/4 length microstrip has a reflection coefficient of around -45 dBi and -35 dB for both bands at their center frequencies, respectively. This array antenna also has a gain for the 3.5Ghz centered band of 5.64 dBi for port 1 and 5.648 dBi for port 2, and for the 7 GHz band, the gain was equal to 8.39 dBi and 8.4 dBi for port 1 and port 2, respectively.