Particle swarm optimization of L-probe fed E-shaped patch antenna using single-objective function

An application of particle swarm optimization (PSO) for wideband patch antenna design is presented in this article. A PSO kernel is built on a MATLAB-driven MoM-based EM simulator FEKO. The chosen antenna geometry in this study is the E-shaped patch but excited by an L-probe feed. Ten geometrical parameters are optimized simultaneously with the use of a single-objective: impedance bandwidth broadening. The desired center frequency of this ceiling mounted WLAN (IEEE 802.11a/n) antenna is set at 5.5 GHz with butterfly beam operation. E-shaped patch geometry of higher order mode is obtained from the PSO-EM optimizer. The simulated results are verified by the experimental results that a ∼3.5 dBi gain at the elevation angles of ±36° and a >50% of 10-dB return-loss bandwidth are obtained at the price of high cross-polarization levels. This suggests that a multiobjective particle swarm optimization should be used for the wideband antenna design in the future study.