Design and simulation of array of rectangular slotted microstrip patch antenna with improved bandwidth for WLAN

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is becoming popular means of data communication for many applications. In this paper, arrays of rectangular slotted microstrip patch antenna are proposed for WLAN in IEEE 802.11a standards. A single antenna element and an array of 1 × 2, 1 × 4 & 1 × 8 of rectangular slotted antenna were designed. The array of rectangular patch antenna gives better results as compared with simple single rectangular patch antenna. Slotting the rectangular antenna gives a further improvement in performance. The 1 × 8 array structure of rectangular slotted patch antenna gives the best performance with Return loss of -30.2 dB, Bandwidth of 68 MHz, Gain of 15.52 dBi & Directivity of 16.07 dBi. Comparative analysis has been done between rectangular patch antenna and rectangular slotted patch antenna. The design of patch antenna has been completed using IE3D software. The antenna has been designed on 0.5 mm RT duroid 5880 substrate with dielectric constant of 2.2 and loss tangent of 0.0004 for 5-6 GHz.