A Compact, High Gain Ring Metamaterial Unit Cell Loaded Triple Band Antenna for 5G Application

A novel planer, compact and quarter-wave transformer-coupled fed multi-band antenna is proposed and designed. The antenna uses a split-ring resonator (SRR) inspired ring metamaterial unit cell. The proposed ring metamaterial unit cell gives single negative (Epsilon negative) behaviour, which improves antenna performance. A partial ground and a quarter-wave transformer-coupled feed line are used to improve the impedance matching of the antenna. The antenna gives multi-band operation at resonating frequencies, 3.5, 8.5, and 13.7 GHz, with 2.9-4.5 GHz, 8.0-10.34 GHz, and 12.3-14.3 GHz, respectively. The maximum gains at resonating frequencies are 1.5 dBi, 4.1 dBi, and 6.5 dBi, with good impedance matching. The novelty of the antenna design is that the loading of the ring unit cell gives resonance at a much smaller wavelength than the resonant wavelength. The proposed antenna provides a miniaturized and multiband response compared to a conventional patch antenna.