Design and Performance Comparison of Metamaterial Superstrate Antenna for DSRC Applications

The modern wireless communication system requires high performance antenna. To meet this objective, this paper presents the design of Metamaterial Superstrate Antenna mainly used for Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) Applications. This antenna consists of an array of rectangular patches which are connected using microstrip line and fed by a 50 ohm microstrip line. The “I” shaped unit cell slots of different sizes are located above the metamaterial superstrate structure. The enhancement in the gain and directivity of the metamaterial antenna is the prime objective of this work. In order to achieve higher gain and directivity, metamaterial superstrate antenna is designed and optimized using Genetic Algorithm and Pattern Search Algorithm. The proposed antenna is designed and fabricated using the commercially available FR4 material. The gain and directivity obtained before optimization are 8.13 dB and 8.08 dB. In order to further improve the gain and directivity of the antenna, various techniques are incorporated to optimize the parameters such as length and width of the ground plane and length of the patch and the results are compared in terms of gain, directivity, return loss and run time required to find the optimal value. The optimized gain and directivity of the Metamaterial Superstrate Antenna using Pattern Search Optimization method are 9.9386 dB and 9.9350 dB at the operating frequency of 5.9 GHz with the return loss of -21.5133 dB.