2013 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer, Control & Communication (IC4), NUST-PNEC, Karachi

Ultra Wideband Antenna with WLAN Band-Notch

Characteristic
Zeeshan Ahmed1, Gul Perwasha1, Saleem Shahid2, H. Zahra3, Ilyas Saleem1, S. Muzahir Abbas1
1

Department of Electrical Engineering, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan

2

Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS),
National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering, Islamabad, Pakistan
zeeshan.ahmed5490@gmail.com, gul.perwasha@gmail.com, 11mseesshahid@seecs.edu.pk, hijab.zahra@ymail.com,
ilyas-saleem@hotmail.com, muzahir_abbas@comsats.edu.pk

Abstract The presented paper exhibits a coplanar waveguide

(CPW)-fed symmetrical staircase shaped, planar monopole
Ultra Wideband (UWB) antenna having dimensions
40x30x1.6mm3 with 5GHz WLAN notch band characteristic.
The staircase pattern in the radiating patch and the U-shaped
slot resonator in the feed line are used to achieve the UWB and
notch the 5GHz WLAN band, respectively. The proposed
antenna has impedance bandwidth ranging from 2.84GHz13.9GHz to cover UWB. Interference caused by WLAN band
from 5.15GHz-5.35GHz and 5.725GHz-5.825GHz is notched
effectively. The proposed antenna has been printed on FR4
substrate with dielectric constant of 4.4 and thickness of
1.6mm. Moreover, the fabricated prototype antenna shows a
good agreement between the simulated and measured results.

eliminate the interference in the UWB due to WLAN bands

which include a rectangular tuning stub entrenched on a
circular annular ring [7], a printed UWB antenna with couple
slotted elements (H-shaped) for WLAN notching [4]. A few
of the other approaches towards band-notching include CoPlanar Waveguide (CPW) fed C-shaped slot antenna [8], an
antenna with a wide slot [9], a CPW-fed rectangular patch
antenna with L-shaped slot in ground plane[10], an inverted
U-slot antenna [11], a circular radiating patch with two Lshaped slots in the ground [12], a rectangular patch antenna
with an E-shaped slot [13] and a CPW resonant cell as
narrow stop-band filter in CPW feed-line [14].
In this paper, a CPW-fed planar monopole staircase
antenna with a WLAN notch band characteristic is presented.
The WLAN band notch is achieved by subtracting a Ushaped slot in the feed-line of the antenna. The stair-case
structure covers the UWB range while the U-shaped slot in
the feed-line prevents the interference with WLAN systems.
The detailed parametric analysis in term of Voltage Standing
Wave Ratio (VSWR) has been presented for the proposed
antenna. Furthermore, gain, current distribution and radiation
pattern plots of the proposed antenna are also presented. The
proposed paper is formulated to describe the antenna
geometry in section-II, modeling, analysis and comparison
between results are presented in section-III while section IV
concludes the paper.

Keywords CPW, monopole, staircase rectangular patch,

notched band, ultra wide band (UWB)

I.

INTRODUCTION

Federal Communication Commissions (FCC) allotment

of the UWB ranging from 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz in 2002 [1],
has made a great impact on commercial uses of this
technology. Several antenna types have been used to
implement this technology among which the microstrip patch
antennas are of great importance because of their eyecatching attributes as they are light weight, low profile,
inexpensive and top of all, quick and simple to fabricate [2].
Despite the progressions in designing microstrip antennas for
UWB technology, the major issues are bandwidth, gain and
radiation losses which limit their performance. To shorten
the limitations, different design techniques have been
implemented to achieve the UWB using microstrip patch
antennas. Some of the noteworthy techniques include
aperture coupling [3], stacking [4], slot compact planar
design [5], parasitic patch [6] and thickening the substrate.

II.

The geometry of the proposed CPW fed antenna with

WLAN band-notch is given in Fig. 1. The antenna is
designed on a cost effective FR4 substrate with thickness
1.6mm, dielectric constant of 4.4 and with a compact size of
40x30mm2. There are 8 Area steps added in increasing
order from bottom to top. With the addition of each area
step, increase in bandwidth is noticed which subsequently
helps in achieving the ultra wideband. The U-shaped slot is
added at 3.5mm from the bottom end of the transmission line
with nearly square shaped CPW ground plane with
dimensions 12.8x13.0mm2 on either side. The gap width g
and the distance between the radiating patch and CPW

With the advancements in antenna technology for UWB

applications, the interference challenges in the frequency
bands were the major ones to consider. The Wireless Local
Area Network (WLAN) technology has significant
contribution to electromagnetic interferences with the UWB
applications. Numerous techniques have been devised to

978-1-4673-5885-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

BAND NOTCH ANTENNA GEOMETRY

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2013 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer, Control & Communication (IC4), NUST-PNEC, Karachi

ground d are kept 0.5mm and 1.2mm, respectively. The

proposed antenna is simulated using 50 SMA (SubMiniature version A) connector to increase the accuracy of
the simulated results. Table I shows the parametric
dimensions of the antenna in detail.

III.

ANTENNA MODELING AND RESULTS

In this section, the simulated results of various

parameters of the proposed planar monopole antenna are
presented. The results of the VSWR, gain (dB), current
distribution and radiation patterns are analyzed and
discussed. The parameters of the proposed antenna are
analyzed by varying one parameter while keeping the other
parameters unchanged.
A. UWB Monopole Antenna without Notch-Band
The Ultra wideband is achieved by adding each Area
step to the patch of the antenna. The variation of VSWR
versus frequency of the planar monopole antenna without
notch-band technique and varying parameter d is studied.
The simulation results in Fig. 2 shows that the impedance
bandwidth is efficiently improved by altering the parameter
d. As the separation distance between the ground and the
patch increases, the impedance bandwidth reduces with a
notch from 6.542GHz to 9.356GHz which is not desirable.
With the increase in parameter d from 1.2mm to 1.4mm,
the antenna is operating in the UWB range and covers less
bandwidth when compared with d=1.2mm. The simulated
VSWR graph of the proposed antenna is shown in Fig. 3,
where the antenna is operating from 2.688GHz to
17.506GHz with VSWR<2 which provides a wide fractional
bandwidth of more than 146%.

(a)

(b)

Fig. 2. VSWR vs. Frequency graph varying d and keeping other

variables constant

Fig. 1. (a) Geometry of proposed antenna with WLAN notch (b) Prototype

TABLE I. DESIGN PARAMETERS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA

Parameters
L
W
Lc
Wc
Lr
Wr
Ln
Wn
Wd

Size(mm)
40.0
30.0
12.8
13.0
14.0
3.0
8.1
0.6
2.2

Parameters
Area 1
Area 2
Area 3
Area 4
Area 5
Area 6
Area 7
Area 8

Size(mm2)
1.5 x 8.4
1.5 x 12.4
1.5 x 15.4
1.5 x 18.4
1.5 x 21.4
1.5 x 24.4
1.5 x 27.0
4.5 x 29.4
Fig. 3. VSWR vs. Frequency graph of the proposed antenna without
band notch characteristic

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2013 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer, Control & Communication (IC4), NUST-PNEC, Karachi

B. UWB Monopole Antenna with Notch-Band Function

A U-shaped slot is subtracted from the transmission line
which ensured the rejection of the WLAN frequency band
from 5.15GHz-5.35GHz and 5.725GHz-5.825GHz. Several
dimensions of the U-shaped slot are varied to obtain the
optimum results. Fig. 4 shows the VSWR graphs of the
proposed antenna by varying the slot parameter Ln while all
other parameters fixed. For Ln=8.1mm, the desired band is
rejected while for Ln= 7.9mm, the lower band of the WLAN,
5.15GHz, is not notched. Similarly when we keep
Ln=8.3mm, the upper band of the desired range is not
rejected. Fig. 5 shows the VSWR versus frequency plot
when Wn is varied. With Wn=0.5mm and 0.7mm, the lower
band of the WLAN band is not notched so we take
Wn=0.6mm for further study.

Fig. 6 Simulated and measured VSWR vs. Frequency graph of the

proposed antenna with WLAN Band-Notch characteristic

The values of several other parameters, before and after

implementing the notch in the UWB range at 5.5 GHz, are
shown in Table II.
TABLE II. PARAMETERS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA AT 5.5 GHZ

PARAMETER

WITHOUT USHAPED SLOT

WITH USHAPED SLOT

MAXIMUM U (W/SR)

0.2063

0.0480

PEAK DIRECTIVITY

3.1628

3.0685

PEAK GAIN (dB)

3.694

0.603

RADIATION EFFICIENCY

1.1680

0.3713

FRONT TO BACK RATIO

4.1131

1.8531

C. Current Distribution, Antenna Gain and Radiation

Characteristics

Fig. 4. VSWR vs. Frequency graph varying Ln keeping other

parameters constant

The comparison between the gain plots of the proposed

antenna, with and without notching, is shown in Fig. 7.
Before subtracting the U-shaped slot from the transmission
line, the proposed antenna has positive gain results between
5GHz to 6GHz range but after the band-rejection, the gain
drops steeply for the WLAN frequency range.
Fig. 8 (a-d) depicts the surface current distribution of the
notching technique applied to the antenna at different
frequencies of 4GHz, 5.5GHz, 7.5GHz and 10GHz,
respectively. The current distribution is relatively normal at
4GHz, 7.5GHz and 10GHz. However, the surface current
density appears to be concentrated around the U-shape slot at
5.5GHz which verifies that antenna is not operating on that
frequency range.

Fig. 5. VSWR vs. Frequency graph varying Wn keeping other

parameters constant

Fig. 9 (a-d) shows the radiation patterns of the proposed

planar monopole antenna at 4GHz, 5.5GHz, 7GHz and
10GHz, respectively. The proposed antenna has a bidirectional dumb-bell shape in the xz-plane throughout the
frequency range and an omni-directional pattern in the yzplane which remains constant throughout the antennas
operating range.

The simulated and measured results of the VSWR of the

proposed antenna are shown in Fig. 6. The antenna has two
resonant bands 2.844GHz-5.008GHz and 5.940GHz13.928GHz. From 5.010GHz to 5.938GHz, the VSWR>2,
verifies the rejection of the unwanted WLAN band. The
prototype of the proposed antenna has been tested using
vector network analyzer.

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2013 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer, Control & Communication (IC4), NUST-PNEC, Karachi

Fig. 7. Gain of the proposed antenna with and without band-notch

characteristic

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Fig. 8. Simulated current distributions at (a) 4GHz (b) 5.5GHz

(c) 7.5GHz (d) 10GHz

Fig. 9. Simulated radiation patterns at (a) 4GHz (b) 5.5GHz (c) 7GHz
(d) 10GHz

IV.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, a CPW-fed planar monopole antenna is

presented which covers UWB range (i.e. 3.10GHz to
10.6GHz) and efficiently rejects the WLAN band (i.e.
5.15GHz-5.35GHz and 5.725GHz-5.825GHz) which is
reported to cause interference due to operating power
differences. UWB is achieved by using staircase design and
the WLAN band is notched by embedding a U-shaped notch
in the feed line. The proposed antenna has a fractional
bandwidth of over 135%, is simple, easy to fabricate, cheap,
(a)

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2013 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer, Control & Communication (IC4), NUST-PNEC, Karachi

compact in size and can be used in UWB wireless

communication systems.
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