An extensive survey on fractal structures using iterated function system in patch antennas

Abstract

SummaryOver the last few years, fractal structure has been used in several engineering fields such as surface physics, telecommunication, fluid mechanics, and so forth. In telecommunication, often there is a demand for miniaturized patch antennas with fractal structures because it is capable of handling very high frequencies with its diminutive structure. The space filling capability of the fractal structures is used to effectively distribute the surface current all over the radiating material. Fractal structures have a better size reduction capability which aids a miniaturized antenna design. This article provides a generalized and detailed survey on fractal structures in a Euclidean space using iterated function system (IFS) in patch antennas. There are various techniques to design a fractal structure, namely, IFSs, escape‐time fractals, strange attractors, L‐systems, random fractals, and so forth. IFSs are widely used technique to construct a finite set of construction mapping on a complete metric space. The fractal geometries designed using the technique are Sierpinski carpet and gasket, Koch snowflake, deterministic tree/binary tree, Gosper island, Minkowski island, Cantor set, T‐square, and some space filling fractals. This paper deals with the above given fractal structures with their design expressions and shapes in recent developments and applications mentioned. The fractal geometries are used in MIMO antennas to abridge the mutually coupled radiators and improve the gain and efficiency of the antenna. This paper also analyzes the effects of fractal structures on MIMO antennas and discusses the ascendancy fractal structures by cross‐referencing the significant antenna parameters.