C.G. Kakoyiannis, G. Stamatiou, A. Karagiannis, and P. Constantinou (Greece)
Efficient small antennas, ground plane, meander-line
We elaborate on the results of an extended study on Euclidean small antennas operating near 2.5 GHz. The focus is on printed meander-line monopoles, which were optimized according to the size and bandwidth constraints imposed by wireless multimedia sensor networks. The performance of small antennas depends heavily on their electrical size, which is determined by the size of the ground (GND) plane, since it is an integral part of the overall radiator; small antennas for tiny sensor nodes cannot neglect the effect of the GND plane. The electrical performance of the tested schemes has been characterized in terms of electrical size, fractional VSWR bandwidth, and broadband total radiation efficiency. A suitable Figure-of-Merit (FoM) is also suggested for performance comparisons. The results show that meander-line antennas outperform more involved antenna configurations in a fair comparison. Moreover, not all antenna elements couple to the ground plane in the same manner; meander-line antennas work better with narrow ground planes. The meander-line antenna with GND plane size 27 mm × 18 mm (0.22λ0 × 0.15λ0) provided the best performance.
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