Multiband and Wideband Antennas for Mobile Communication Systems

Abstract

The popularity of mobile communication systems has increased remarkably during the last decade and the market demand still continues to increase. As a fundamental part of these systems, antenna is one of the most important design issues in modern mobile communication units. Although there are several similar definitions, an antenna can be mainly described as a device, which transforms the electromagnetic waves in an antenna to radiating waves in an unbounded medium such as air in transmitting mode and vice versa in receiving mode. Because antennas are dependent on frequency, they are designed to operate for certain frequency bands. The rapid growth of mobile communication systems has forced to the use of novel antennas for base and mobile station applications (mobile phone, notebook computer, personal digital assistants (PDA), etc.). Earlier, mobile systems were designed to operate for one of the frequency bands of 2G (second generation) systems, which are Digital Cellular System (DCS), Personal Communications Service (PCS) and Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks. Currently, many mobile communication systems use several frequency bands such as GSM 900/1800/1900 bands (890-960 MHz and 1710-1990 MHz); Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) and UMTS 3G expansion bands (1900-2200 MHz and 2500-2700 MHz); and Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity)/Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) bands (2400-2500 MHz and 5100-5800 MHz) where the list of frequently used frequency bands is given in Table 1 (Best, 2008). Conventionally, because a single antenna can not operate at all of these frequency bands of mobile communication, multiple different antennas covering these bands separately should be used. However, usage of many antennas is usually limited by the volume and cost constraints of the applications. Therefore, multiband and wideband antennas are essential to provide multifunctional operations for mobile communication. A multiband antenna in a mobile communication system can be defined as the antenna operating at distinct frequency bands, but not at the intermediate frequencies between bands. For example, a triple band antenna for GSM 900/1800/1900 bands can cover the frequency bands 890-960 MHz and 1710-1990 MHz (Ali et al., 2003); however, it does not operate properly at the frequencies such as 1200 MHz or 2500 MHz. On the other hand, a wideband antenna operates at every frequency points within a given frequency band. For example, a wideband antenna covering UMTS, extended UMTS and WLAN 2400 bands functions at every frequency points