An omnidirectional cylindrical DRA with a cone ground for WLAN applications

To meet the omnidirectional and high gain requirements of wireless local area networks (WLAN) communication systems, a centrally probe-fed cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) with a cone ground is proposed. Generally, most of the DRA is set on a metallic ground plane with a suitable size. However, the maximum radiation direction may deviate from the intended horizontal direction and the gain is often reduced badly, when the ground plane enlarges to a certain size in many applications. To solve this problem, a metallic ground in cone shape is introduced. Then a cylindrical DRA with the cone ground is designed. The simulated results show that the return loss is less than -10dB from 2.31GHz to 2.71GHz, which has a complete coverage of WLAN band and is wider than the cylindrical DRA with normal ground plane. And the maximum radiation direction is almost in horizontal direction with only 5° upward-bending. Moreover, the gain in the horizontal direction is not only reduced, but also 0.8dBi higher than the conventional cylindrical DRA.