Left Handed Metamaterial antenna design for GSM 1.8 GHz applications

Left Handed Metamaterial are the artificial material having negative value of refractive index thus following left hand property. Miniaturization is one of the best advantages offered by metamaterial. The paper presents the ideas about the use of metamaterials in innovative antenna designs from an engineering perspective. In the previous work, an eight shaped left handed metamaterial was designed with the help of FR4 substrate having μr = -4 and εr = -2 at 1.8 GHz. Present work includes the use of previously designed structure as a base substrate for rectangular microstrip patch antenna for size minimization and characteristics improvement. The traditionally designed antenna resonates at 1.8 GHz with -12 dB return loss with low cost FR4 as a base substrate on the other hand metamaterial loaded layer antenna resonates at 1.8 GHz with -34 dB return loss. By adding left-handed metamaterial return loss has been improved and the effective volume of the rectangular microstrip patch antenna is also shortened by 71% and 47% reduction was applied to the base substrate of the patch antenna. Line feeding technique is used for the excitation of the proposed antenna. The process of designing and simulation is done using CST Microwave Studio 2010 and MATLAB is used for the retrieval of complex dielectric parameters using NRW (Nicholson Ross-weir) approach. The fundamental parameters of the antenna such as return loss, Bandwidth, gain, radiation pattern are obtained and are compared with the traditionally designed antenna.