IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

11, 2012

293

A Novel UWB Antenna With Dual Notched Bands

for WiMAX and WLAN Applications
Wen Jiang and Wenquan Che

AbstractA novel planar ultrawideband (UWB) antenna with

dual notched bands is proposed and investigated. The antenna consists of a square patch and a modified grounded plane. To realize
dual notched bands characteristics, a T-shaped stub embedded in
the square slot of the radiation patch and a pair of U-shaped parasitic strips beside the feed line is used. The advantage of this antenna is the high rejection level in the stopband. The measured results show that the proposed dual-notched-bands planar antenna
shows a very wide bandwidth from 2.8 to 11.0 GHz defined by
voltage standing wave ratio
, with two notched bands
of 3.3-4.0 GHz (WiMAX band) and 5.055.90 GHz (WLAN band),
respectively. Both the experimental and simulated results of the
proposed antenna are presented, indicating that the antenna is a
good candidate for various UWB applications.
Index TermsDual notched bands, planar antenna, ultrawideband (UWB) antenna.

I. INTRODUCTION

N RECENT years, the increasing demands for antenna

with multiband operation in modern wireless communication systems have attracted much attention. In particular,
as one of the key components of the ultrawideband (UWB)
system, extremely broadband antennas have been launched in
the frequency range from 3.110.6 GHz, which has drawn the
attention of a large number of researchers because of its advantages of low cost, resistant to severe multipath and jamming,
etc. [1].
Lately, a number of antennas with notched band property have been proposed, and various techniques have been
used to achieve the function. The widely used methods are
etching slots on the patch or on the ground plane, i.e., such
as H-shaped slot [2], U-shaped slot [3], C-shaped slot [4],
etc. Introducing parasitic strips [5] near the radiation elements
or the ground plane is another way to create notched bands.
However, most of the previous works have been focused on the
single-notched-band design; few works have been concentrated
on dual-notched-bands design. Dual-notched-bands antennas
have been recently reported [6][8]. In these designs, by inserting the proper slits in the interior of the radiation element
and the ground plane, two rejected bands have been obtained.
Manuscript received December 20, 2011; revised February 02, 2012;
accepted March 05, 2012. Date of publication March 09, 2012; date of current
version March 26, 2012. This work was supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant 60971013.
The authors are with the Department of Communication Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China (e-mail:
jiangwen@126.com; yeeren_che@163.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2012.2190490

Fig. 1. Configuration and parameters of the UWB antenna (unit: millimeters).

Most of these designs have the common deficiency of poor

voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) of the dual notched bands.
In this letter, a novel UWB planar antenna with dual notched
bands is proposed. A T-shaped stub in the radiation patch and
two U-shaped stubs beside the feeding line are used to realize
dual-band-notch characteristic. In other design, two T-shaped
stubs are used to achieve a notched band [9], and in our design
two U-shaped stubs beside the feeding line are first used in
the UWB antenna to achieve a notched band. The parametrical
analyses of these filtering structures are carried out. An antenna prototype is designed and fabricated to demonstrate the
proposed strategy. The proposed antenna structure is simulated
using the Ansoft High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS),
one commercial 3-D full-wave electromagnetic simulation
software. The simulation and measurement both indicate dual
bands rejection with central frequencies of 3.6 and 5.5 GHz,
respectively, and excellent notched band characteristics.
II. ANTENNA DESIGN AND RESULTS
A. UWB Monopole Antenna
Fig. 1 shows the geometry of a UWB monopole antenna. The
antenna is fabricated on Rogers4003 substrate with dielectric
constant of 3.38 and thickness of 0.8 mm. The radiating element and feeding line are printed on the top side of the substrate and the ground plane on the bottom side. The width of the
microstrip feed line is chosen as 2 mm to achieve the characteristic impedance of 50 . The dimensions of the designed anmm,
mm,
tenna after optimization are as follows:
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm.
mm,
In the presented design, the monopole antenna and the ground
plane form an equivalent dipole antenna [9]. The current distribution on the patch affects the impedance characteristics of the
antenna. By cutting the two notches of suitable dimensions at
the two lower corners of the patch, it is the same with [10] that

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

Fig. 2. Simulated VSWR of the proposed antenna without notched bands in

case of different .

Fig. 4. Configuration and parameters of the UWB antenna with dual notched
bands.

Fig. 3. Simulated gain of the UWB antenna with and without bevel on the
ground plane.

the impedance bandwidth can be much enhanced. This phenomenon occurs because the two notches affect the electromagnetic
coupling between the rectangular patch and the ground plane.
The gap between the radiation patch and ground plane is denoted as , which is also an important parameter to control the
impedance bandwidth, as shown in Fig. 2. The patch and the
ground plane form an equivalent dipole antenna. The ground
plane is beveled, resulting in a smooth transition from one resonant mode to another and ensuring good impedance match and
stable gain over a broad frequency range. The gains of the antenna with and without bevel on the ground plane are shown in
Fig. 3. The proposed antenna can achieve high gain at low and
high frequency with bevel on the ground plane.

Fig. 5. Simulated current distributions at different notch frequencies.

(a) 3.5 GHz. (b) 5.5 GHz.

B. UWB Monopole Antenna With Two Notched Bands

To achieve dual notched bands, a T-shaped stub on the radiating patch and a pair of U-shaped stubs near the feeding line
are adopted to generate notched bands with central frequencies
of 3.6 and 5.5 GHz, respectively. The configuration is shown in
Fig. 4.
The simulated current distributions of the UWB antenna at
the notched frequencies are shown in Fig. 5(a) and (b). We may
note that the currents are mainly distributed around the filter
structures and oppositely directed between the interior and exterior edges. Therefore, the resultant radiation fields can be canceled out, and high attenuation near the resonant frequency is
achieved, thus resulting in notched band.

Fig. 6. Simulated band-rejection characteristics of the proposed antenna with

dual notched bands in case of different .

To further investigate the design of the proposed antenna,

some parametric studies are carried out next. The notched performances are mainly determined by , , , and . The
first notch band is mainly decided by the dimension of T-shaped
stub. Figs. 6 and 7 show the simulated band-rejecting characteristics of the antenna in cases of different
and , respectively. Obviously, the frequency shifts from around 3.07 to
3.77 GHz when
changes from 6.5 to 5.5 mm, while the frequency shifts from around 3.36 to 3.71 GHz when
from 7.5

JIANG AND CHE: UWB ANTENNA WITH DUAL NOTCHED BANDS FOR WiMAX AND WLAN

Fig. 7. Simulated band-rejection characteristics of the proposed antenna with

dual notched bands in case of different .

295

Fig. 10. Photograph of the fabricated prototype, with the simulated and measured VSWR characteristics of the dual notched bands.

Fig. 8. Simulated band-rejection characteristics of the proposed antenna with

.
dual notched bands in case of different

Fig. 9. Simulated band-rejection characteristics of the proposed antenna with

.
dual notched bands in case of different

to 6.5 mm. The parameters

and
mainly affect the second
notched bands. Figs. 8 and 9 illustrate the effects of the parameters
and . When increasing
and
with other parameters fixed, the second notched band moves to a lower frequency.
The second notch frequency can be assumed from (1). The final
design parameters are the following:
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm,
mm
(1)

Fig. 11. Measured radiation patterns at three frequencies. (a) 3.1 GHz.
(b) 6.5 GHz. (c) 9 GHz.

where (
) is the length of the U-shaped strip,
is the effective dielectric constant, and is the speed of light.
To demonstrate the above-discussed design strategy, an antenna prototype is designed and fabricated, as shown in Fig. 10.
For comparison, both the measured and simulated VSWR characteristics of the proposed antenna are illustrated in Fig. 10.
Good agreement can be observed. The discrepancy between the

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 11, 2012

TABLE I
COMPARISONS OF THE PROPOSED UWB ANTENNA TO OTHER UWB ANTENNAS

Fig. 12. Simulated gain of the proposed antenna.

measured and simulated results is probably owing to the fabrication tolerance of the prototype. From software simulation, we
also know that the performances of the antenna are also sensitive to the thickness of the substrate. In the simulation, we
set the metal to ideal conductor, so we ignore the thickness of
the metal. The fabricated antenna has the frequency range from
2.8 to 11 GHz with
, covering the entire UWB
band with dual notched band of 3.34.0 and 5.055.90 GHz,
respectively.
The radiation patterns of the proposed antenna were measured in an anechoic chamber. The measured far-field radiation patterns of the proposed dual-band-notched antenna in the
E-plane and H-plane at the frequencies of 3.1, 6.5, and 9 GHz
are plotted in Fig. 11. It can be seen that the radiation patterns
in the -plane are nearly omnidirectional, but more directive
in the higher band.
The simulated gain of the antenna, from 3 to 11 GHz, is also
plotted in Fig. 12. As expected, the gain decreases obviously
in the vicinity of 3.6 and 5.5 GHz. Outside the notched band,
antenna gain with a variation of less than 3 dB is achieved, indicating stable gain performances across the operation band.
In addition, the comparisons for several different
dual-notched-band UWB antennas are illustrated in Table I.
Compared to [6] and [8], the proposed UWB antenna with dual
notched bands has better band-notch characteristics.
III. CONCLUSION
In this letter, a novel compact printed antenna with dual-bandnotched characteristics used for UWB applications has been
presented and investigated. Adjusting the gap between the radiation patch and ground plane, a wide impedance bandwidth is

achieved. By introducing a T-shaped stub in the radiation patch

and a pair of U-shaped parasitic elements beside the feed line,
dual stopbands for applications of WiMAX and WLAN are created. The radiation pattern of this antenna shows good omnidirectional performance throughout the UWB frequency range
and constant gain in the UWB band is realized. Accordingly, the
proposed antenna is expected to be a good candidate in various
UWB systems.
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