1466 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

15, 2016

Dual-Band Radiation Tilting Endfire Antenna

for WLAN Applications
Abdolmehdi Dadgarpour, Student Member, IEEE, Behnam Zarghooni, Student Member, IEEE,
Tayeb A. Denidni, Senior Member, IEEE, and Ahmed A. Kishk, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—A dual-band bow-tie antenna with enhanced tilt band between 7.3 and 7.5 GHz. Here, we aim to cover a dual-
angle in the azimuth plane at 2.4 and 5.5 GHz is proposed. frequency band, which is necessary for practical applications
The proposed antenna consists of bow-tie radiators with dual- such as multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) systems.
impedance bandwidth operating at 2.3–2.5 and 5.2–5.8 GHz. To
enhance the tilt angle in the azimuth plane, an array of H-shaped More recently, an electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structure
meander-line unit cells as electric resonators is designed at 2.4 and has been embedded in the orthogonal plane of dipole antenna
5.5 GHz with high refractive index property. Integrating the pro- [6], to tilt the main beam direction of the dipole antenna by 28◦
posed array in the off-axis of the bow-tie antenna tilts the main at 3.5 GHz. Even though the proposed structure is simple, it
beam radiation in the endfire direction by +17◦ and −20◦ at requires each conductor element constituting the EBG unit cell
2.4 and 5.5 GHz, respectively. When the beam is tilted by 17◦ ,
there is a gain enhancement of 2.7 dBi at 5.5 GHz compared to the to be short-circuited to the ground, which can complicate its
unloaded case. construction and increase the cost of the antenna. Furthermore,
to increase the antenna gain, it is necessary to deploy a 1 × 4
Index Terms—Beam tilting, bow-tie antenna, metamaterial, dipoles antenna array.
WLAN. In this letter, we have deployed the same technique presented
in [5] and designed a dual-band bow-tie antenna operating at 2.4
I. I NTRODUCTION and 5.5 GHz suitable for WLAN applications. Then, an array of
meander-line H-shaped resonators operating at 2.4 and 5.5 GHz
E NHANCING the tilt angle and gain of antenna for wire-
less communication systems has attracted considerable
attention. The antenna can be mounted on the tower and stuck
is designed and embedded separately in the vicinity of a dual-
band bow-tie antenna on the top and bottom surfaces of the
out of the wall to improve the link quality as well as the channel antenna substrate. The measured results confirm that the main
capacity. Improving the tilt angle can be implemented elec- beam direction of the antenna in the azimuth plane at 2.4 GHz
tronically by using PIN diodes or RF microelectromechanical is tilted by 17◦ with gain enhancement of 1.5 dBi. In addition,
systems (MEMS) [1]–[3]. However, it cause large losses and the radiation beam at 5.5 GHz is deflected by −20◦ with gain
gain scan loss. Mechanically beam titling [4] is a promising enhancement of 2.7 dBi as opposed to a conventional bow-tie
candidate since the gain is not reduced and a wide scan angle antenna.
can be accomplished. The drawback of this approach is its
mechanical installation. II. B EAM T ILTING M ECHANISM
Recently, the authors in [5] have integrated an array of elec- To deform the main-beam direction for the antenna printed
tric resonators in the vicinity of the bow-tie antenna arrays on a dielectric substrate with certain dielectric constant, it is
to further deflect the radiation beam of endfire antenna by necessary to integrate a greater refractive index media in the off-
17◦ over 7.3–7.5 GHz, which can be applied for base-station axis of the endfire antenna. The beam tilting is due to the phase
applications. With this technique, the radiation beam can be differential resulted from the bunch of rays emanating from
easily deflected under the horizon to cover the desired cell, as bow-tie antenna in the antenna radiating aperture. In Fig. 1, the
well as reducing the interference and improve the link quality. TE surface waves travel a shorter length through the metama-
However, the proposed antenna solely covers a single frequency terial regiondenoted by “a.” The waves traveling the longest
length b = (L2 + a2 ), where L is the length of metamaterial
Manuscript received October 16, 2015; accepted December 27, 2015. Date region in the x-direction. Thus, simply increasing the length of
of publication December 29, 2015; date of current version May 12, 2016.
A. Dadgarpour, and T. A. Denidni are with INRS-EMT, University of the metamaterial region along the x-direction leads to a larger
Quebec, Montreal, QC, H5A 1K6, Canada (e-mail: abdolmehdi.dadgarpour@ phase differential, consequently causing a larger tilt angle. This
emt.inrs.ca; denidni@emt.inrs.ca). is realized by embedding an array of electric resonators in the
B. Zarghooni is with the Poly-Grames Research Center, École azimuth plane of the antenna, which by exciting the E-field
Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, QC H3T 1J4, Canada (e-mail:
behnam.zarghooni@polymtl.ca). along the axis of the unit cell, an electric resonance is generated,
A. A. Kishk is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which increases the permittivity artificially. In fact, the pro-
Concordia University, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada (e-mail: kishk@encs. posed array of electric resonators can be regarded as a meta-lens
concordia.ca).
since the phase velocity is reduced, and it is analogous to a rect-
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. angular lens. To implement this approach, we have deployed an
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2015.2513363 electric resonator as shown in Fig. 2.
1536-1225 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
DADGARPOUR et al.: DUAL-BAND RADIATION TILTING ENDFIRE ANTENNA FOR WLAN APPLICATIONS 1467

Fig. 1. Mechanism of beam tilting in the E-plane of the bow-tie antenna.

Fig. 3. S-parameters of the (a) Type-A unit cell and (b) Type-B unit cell.

Fig. 2. Geometry of the meander-line H-shaped unit cell. (a) Type A.

(b) Type B.

To extract the S-parameters as well as refractive index, PEC

and PMC boundary conditions are located in the yz- and xy-
planes of the proposed unit cell, shown in Fig. 2. The two ports
also are assigned in the y-direction.
The transmission and reflection coefficients of two types of
the unit cell demonstrated in Fig. 3 clearly show the signal
passes through the unit cell in the operating frequency bands
of 2.4 and 5.5 GHz.
The proposed unit cell consists of two types of materials. The
first one, Type A, has a refractive index of 2.2 at 2.4 GHz, and
the second one, Type B, possesses a refractive index of 2.15 at
5.5 GHz. The extracted refractive indexes of Type A and B are
shown in Fig. 4, which is calculated according to the algorithm
of Kramers–Kronig [7].

III. B OW-T IE A NTENNA W ITH I NTEGRATED

M ETAMATERIAL L OADING (IML)
In this section, a dual-band bow-tie antenna operating at 2.4
and 5.5 GHz is proposed. The presented antenna is a modi-
Fig. 4. Refractive index of (a) Type A and (b) Type B of proposed unit cells in
fied version of the design in [8]. The configuration of dual-band Fig. 1.
antenna printed on RT5880 with permittivity 2.2 and thickness
1.575 mm is revealed in Fig. 5. It consists of the microstrip
line connected to double-sided bow-tie radiators. As explained index of antenna substrate. For that purpose, a 3 × 4 array of
in Section II, to deflect the main beam direction of the endfire Type B is loaded on the top surface of the substrate in front
antenna at 2.4 and 5.5 GHz, it is necessary to integrate an array of the bow-tie antenna, as shown in Fig. 5, which is responsi-
of meander-line H-shaped unit cells with a greater refractive ble to tilt the radiation at 5.5 GHz. In addition, a 4 × 5 array
1468 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 15, 2016

Fig. 5. Configuration of proposed antenna embedded with meander-line Fig. 7. Radiation patterns of proposed antenna in the E-plane (xy) with increas-
H-shaped unit cells on the top and bottom surfaces of substrate. ing number of Type-B unit cells along the x-direction and a conventional
bow-tie antenna at 5.5 GHz.

Fig. 6. Poynting vector distribution over the antenna at (a) 5.5 and (b) 2.4 GHz
with Type-B and Type-A unit cells.
Fig. 8. Photograph dual-band bow-tie antenna with metamaterials. (a) Top
view. (b) Bottom view.
of Type A is incorporated in the vicinity of the larger bow-tie
radiator on the bottom surface to deflect the main radiation
at 2.4 GHz.
The Pointing vector distribution over the antenna is demon-
strated in Fig. 6. It can be seen that at 5.5 GHz, most electro-
magnetic waves tend to move toward the region, where Type-B
unit cells are expanded, and at 2.4 GHz, the energy is radi-
ated toward the Type-A region. It is important to mention that
since the larger bow-tie radiator is responsible for radiation at
2.4 GHz, a 4 × 5 array of Type A is embedded in the vicinity
of the radiator to have more effective interaction with electric
resonators. Additionally, an array of Type B is located in front
of the small radiator, which is responsible for propagation at Fig. 9. Reflection coefficient of bow-tie antenna loaded with IML and conven-
5.5 GHz to achieve more tilting. tional bow-tie antenna.
To reduce the size of the antenna, it is better to design a single
electric-resonator unit cell, which has a dual-band high refrac- The measured reflection coefficient in Fig. 9 confirms that the
tive index property at 2.4 and 5.5 GHz, respectively. In fact, proposed antenna has a dual-band impedance matching at 2.4
instead of having two different unit cells, we can have a single and 5.5 GHz. It is observed that the magnitude of S11 is below
unit cell, which effectively reduces the antenna size. −10 dB over 2.24–2.45 and 5.2–5.7 GHz, which is suitable for
To better understand the effect of increasing the number of WLAN applications. The measured reflection coefficient of the
unit cells along the x-direction, a parametric study is under- bow-tie antenna without metamaterials is better than −10 dB at
taken as shown in Fig. 7. The results indicate that increasing 2.4 and 5.5 GHz as shown in Fig. 9.
the number of Type-B unit cells from 3 × 3 to 5 × 3 enhances The measured and computed radiation patterns of the dual-
the tilt angle at 5.5 GHz. This is attributed to the increase of the band bow-tie antenna are shown in Fig. 10. The E-plane (xy)
phase differential. is shown in Fig. 10, indicating that the main-beam direction
is tilted by +17◦ and −20◦ at 2.4 and 5.5 GHz, respectively.
The H-plane radiation pattern shown in Fig. 10(c) proves that
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS the main-beam radiation remains unchanged in the endfire
The photographs of the fabricated proposed dual-band bow- direction at 2.4 and 5.5 GHz.
tie antenna integrated by metamaterial unit cells is shown in The antenna gain is measured utilizing the gain comparison
Fig. 8. approach with measuring the received power of the reference
DADGARPOUR et al.: DUAL-BAND RADIATION TILTING ENDFIRE ANTENNA FOR WLAN APPLICATIONS 1469

The simulation radiation efficiency when an array of Type B

is integrated in front of bow-tie radiators corresponds to 90% at
5.5 GHz.

V. C ONCLUSION
A dual-band bow-tie antenna with enhancing the tilt angle in
the E-plane at 2.4 and 5.5 GHz has been presented. The pro-
posed antenna has been composed of two double-sided bow-tie
radiators integrated by an array of meander-line H-shaped unit
cells on the two sides of the antenna substrate. The antenna
beam has been tilted from the endfire direction by 17◦ and
−20◦ at 5.5 and 2.4 GHz, respectively. The measured antenna
gain at 5.5 GHz corresponds to 8 dBi. The proposed antenna
is a promising candidate for the base-station MIMO antenna
applications.

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