Bandwidth and Gain Enhancement of a Rectangular Metasurface Microstrip Patch Antenna

Antenna designers often deal with the trade-off between gain and bandwidth. This paper presents a novel technique based on metasurface reflector to enhance the gain and bandwidth of a rectangular microstrip patch antenna. The proposed rectangular patch antenna is designed with a resonant frequency of 2.4 GHz with FR4 substrate and partial ground plane. Partial ground plane is a well known technique for ultra wide band antenna applications. However, it reduces the gain of a patch antenna, remarkably. In order to increase the gain, a metasurface designed with elongated microstrip dipoles of length equal to Ag with FR4 substrate that is placed below the partial ground plane with a gap of λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf>/10. Simulated results obtained through ANSYS HFSS demonstrates an improvement in the gain from 2.4 dB to 5 dB with a bandwidth of about 2.5 times larger than the ordinary microstrip patch antenna of the same specifications. Simulated results have verifiedt that the overall performance of the microstrip antenna has been increased due to the metasurface reflector.