Bandwidth and Gain Enhancement of Microstrip Leaky-Wave Antennas with Slot and Defected Ground Structure

This paper discusses the design, simulation, and realization of a leaky-wave microstrip antenna with multiple slots and defected ground structure (DGS). The leaky-wave microstrip antenna with multiple slots and DGS was designed to operate at 5.925-6,425 GHz for wireless local area network applications (WLANs), with a gain of >_4dBi. The antenna uses FR-4 epoxy as the substrate with a dielectric constant of 4.6 and a thickness of 1.6 mm. The leaky-wave microstrip antenna has dimensions of 45.1 mm x 24.8 mm x 1.6 mm, while the leaky-wave microstrip antenna with multiple slots and DGS has dimensions of 40.6 mm x 25 mm x 1.6 mm. The simulation results showed that adding multiple slots and DGS to the leaky wave microstrip antenna increased the bandwidth from 280 MHz (5.859-6.139 GHz) to 691 MHz (5.854-6.545 GHz) while the gain increased from 4.47 to 5.04 dBi. Meanwhile, the measurement results showed that the bandwidth parameter increased from 273 MHz (5.877-6.150 GHz) to 684 MHz (5.845-6.529 GHz) and the gain parameter from 4.53 to 5.06 dBi at 6 GHz.