IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

13, 2014

1705

An H-Fractal Antenna for Multiband Applications

Wei-Chung Weng, Senior Member, IEEE, and Chia-Liang Hung

AbstractAn H-fractal used for a multiband antenna is presented. The H-fractal planar antenna has been fabricated on an
FR4 substrate with a 1.6-mm thickness. The proposed antenna can
excite multiple resonances with reasonable antenna directivity. Reflection coefficients and radiation properties show that the proposed H-fractal antenna is a good candidate for a variety of antenna applications.
Index TermsFractals, multiband, planar antennas, particle
swarm optimization (PSO), WLAN.

I. INTRODUCTION

RACTALS are self-similarity patterns, which are inspired

from phenomena of nature such as coastlines, mountains,
and clouds [1], [2]. Fractals can be applied for antenna designs
to achieve goals of multiband, wideband, and size miniaturization [3][6]. Many fractal shapes such as Hilbert curve, Sierpinski gasket, and Koch snowflake have been adopted for designing antennas [7][10].
In this study, a new H-shaped fractal is used to design a
multiband planar antenna. In contrast to conventional geometries of Hilbert curve, Sierpinski gasket, and Koch, the
proposed H-fractal has a more simple structure. The design
process of the proposed H-fractal is quite straightforward and
easy for implementation. Reflection coefficients
show the
multiband feature of the proposed H-fractal antenna. Details of
the proposed H-fractal antenna are presented and discussed.

Fig. 1. Different stages of the H-shaped fractal. The geometry of Stage 7 is

used in the proposed antenna.

II. ANTENNA DESIGN

Fig. 1 reveals the design process of the H-shaped fractal antenna. In the beginning (Stage 1), the antenna consists of a horizontal metal strip with length
and width
. In Stage 2,
the length of the two vertical strips ( ) is
, where is
the scale factor with the value between 0 and 1. Hence,
is
smaller than
. Meanwhile, the two vertical strips are added
to the two ends of the horizontal strip. The width of the two vertical strips is 3.0 mm, which is the same as that of the horizontal
strip. The same procedure is applied to Stages 37 as well. Finally, the proposed H-fractal antenna is achieved at Stage 7 as
shown in Fig. 2. The length of strips in each stage can be determined by
(1)

Manuscript received March 16, 2014; revised July 18, 2014; accepted August
20, 2014. Date of publication August 28, 2014; date of current version January
15, 2015. This work was supported in part by the NSC under Grant 100-2221E-260-036.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chi
Nan University, Puli 54561, Taiwan (e-mail: weichung@ieee.org).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2014.2351618

Fig. 2. Geometry of the proposed H-fractal antenna (Stage 7).

TABLE I
DIMENSIONS OF THE PROPOSED H-FRACTAL ANTENNA SHOWN IN FIG. 2

The width of all metal strips is identical as 3.0 mm. The geometry of the H-fractal is symmetric to the 50- microstrip-fed
line with the corresponding width of
. The size of the ground
plane is
. Other dimensions of the proposed antenna
are listed in Table I.
The geometry of the H-fractal should be carefully determined
to avoid overlapping between strips when designing the proposed antenna. The scale factor can control the size of the
antenna; hence, it is one of the key parameters affecting the resonances and impedances of the proposed antenna. Usually, in

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014

this case, the overlapping occurs in the -direction more than in

the -direction. The following equations can be used for determining the range of the scale factor in the -direction to avoid
the overlapping:
(2)
(3)
where is the stage number used in the H-shaped fractal. The
starts from 3 since the overlapping will not occur at Stage-1
and Stage-2 geometries. For the proposed Stage 7 (
)
H-fractal, in order to avoid the overlapping between the microstrip-fed line (with the width of W0) and the edge of the strips
created at Stage 7 in the -direction, the length of
should be larger than that of
; that is

Fig. 3. Reflection coefficients

of the proposed H-fractal antenna. The
photograph is the proposed H-fractal planar antenna fabricated on an FR4 substrate with an overall size of 120.0 102.27 mm .

(4)
The
and
can be expressed in terms of
Equation (4) becomes

by (1).
(5)

Substituting
and
(shown in Table I) to (5) and solving
(5) to obtain the solution, we obtain
( should be
real number and
). Hence, is set to 0.7 in this letter.
For the H-fractal with other stages, the can be determined in
the similar way.
To achieve a compact antenna size, the fractal antenna usually
operates at its dominant resonant frequency. To design the proposed H-fractal antenna working at the dominant resonant frequency, the design procedure is suggested and listed as follows.
1) Determine the total electric length
about quarterwavelength in free space at the lowest band (the dominant resonant frequency).
2) Determine the stage number and
that the H-shaped
fractal will be used. The strip lengths can be determined
based on and (1).
3) Use (1)(3) to obtain the range of the scale factor .
4) Determine
and obtain the H-shaped fractal
configuration.
5) Modify the dimensions of the proposed antenna based
on the
and to achieve the desired resonant frequencies. This will repeat the operations in the Steps 25.
6) Achieve good impedance match at operating bands.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The proposed H-shaped fractal antenna was fabricated on an
FR4. The FR4 substrate has the thickness ( ) of 1.6 mm, dielectric constant of 4.4, and loss tangent of 0.02. Fig. 3 illustrates
the simulated and measured reflection coefficients
and the
photograph of the proposed H-shaped fractal antenna. Simulated and measured results are obtained by the method of moments (MoM)-based electromagnetic (EM) simulator IE3D [11]
and by an HP 8753D vector network analyzer, respectively. The
multiband feature of the proposed H-shaped fractal antenna is

Fig. 4. Input impedance of the proposed H-fractal antenna. The solid line is the
resistance . The dashed line is the reactance .

achieved. In addition, an excellent agreement between simulated and measured curves is shown in Fig. 3, which verifies
the validity of simulated results. Hence, we used simulated results to investigate the input impedance, resonance, radiation,
and directivity properties of the proposed H-fractal antenna.
Fig. 4 shows the input impedance of the proposed H-fractal
antenna. The dominant resonant frequency is 0.36 GHz when
the
equals zero. The resistance at 0.36 GHz is quite small
(2.7 ), resulting in a mismatch at 50 . This problem could be
solved by well-known techniques such as using an impedance
transformer to obtain a good impedance match.
To observe the variation of the resonant frequencies, simulated reflection coefficients
of the H-fractal antenna in different stages are investigated. The results are shown in Fig. 5.
The arrow lines trace the variation. Resonant frequencies decrease as the stage number increases. The resonant frequency
at 2.82 GHz is shown in Fig. 5(a). The resonant frequency decreases from 2.82 GHz in Stage 1 to 1.32 GHz in Stage 7 as
shown in Fig. 5(b). The result shows that the dimensions of the
proposed antenna can be adjusted for operating at desired bands.
The numerical experiments have shown that the stage
number, scale factor , and
are key parameters affecting the
antenna size. The above parameters further affect resonances

WENG AND HUNG: H-FRACTAL ANTENNA FOR MULTIBAND APPLICATIONS

Fig. 5. Simulated reflection coefficients

of the proposed H-fractal anat Stages 14 and
tenna in different stages. (a) Reflection coefficients
at Stages 47.
(b) reflection coefficients

and impedances of the proposed antenna. The antenna size

in the -direction increases from 45.21 mm in Stage 1 to
82.27 mm in Stage 7. Note that the
is fixed in the y-direction. As the antenna geometry has more stages, the complexity
of the antenna structure increases. Also, the paths and lengths
of currents are increased when the antenna geometry has more
stages. Therefore, multiple resonances are created, and the
shifting resonances are down in frequency. This phenomenon
can be confirmed by the antennas impedance shown in Fig. 4.
The proposed H-shaped fractal can reduce the antennas size
especially when the antenna operates at low frequencies.
Fig. 6 shows the simulated reflection coefficients
of the
proposed H-fractal antenna versus frequency for different
and . As shown in Fig. 6(a), when
increases ( is fixed at
0.7), the antenna size becomes large and the resonant frequencies decrease. As the
changes, reflection coefficients
and impedance bandwidths respectively become better or worse
at different resonant frequencies, especially at higher frequencies, due to complicated multiresonant effects. Fig. 6(b) shows
the effect of the ( is fixed at 61.2 mm). The same conclusion can be applied to the when the becomes large. The
resonances are close to each other to form the wideband feature near 5.5 GHz. This multiresonant phenomenon makes the
proposed H-fractal antenna possible, becoming a wideband antenna operating at desired bands. As shown in Figs. 5 and 6,

1707

Fig. 6. Simulated reflection coefficients

tenna versus frequency for different (a)

of the proposed H-fractal anand (b) .

the ratio among the resonances is not constant when the antenna size is changed with a ratio. Some resonances are changed
largely, whereas some resonances are changed slightly. Therefore,
and can be used to control the reflection coefficients
and impedance bandwidths of the proposed antenna to obtain
multiband or wideband features operating at desired bands. For
example, the proposed antenna has good impedance match at
5.5 GHz as shown in Fig. 3. Hence, this proposed H-fractal antenna is a good candidate for working at the 5.5-GHz WLAN
band.
To utilize this multiband feature for practical application,
the proposed H-fractal antenna is further optimized by our own
in-house particle swarm optimization (PSO) method, combined
with the IE3D to obtain the good impedance match at the
2.45-GHz (2.42.5 GHz) and 5.5-GHz (56 GHz) WLAN
bands. The PSO serves as an external optimizer to control
the IE3D [12].
, , and
are optimized; meanwhile,
18 particles are used in PSO. The optimization range of , ,
and
is set to be [5363 mm], [0.650.72], and [14 mm],
respectively. For the sake of brevity, other detailed concepts of
PSO and optimization procedure [12], [13] are excluded here.
The dimensions of the optimized antenna are listed in Table II.
The optimized is 0.697. Fig. 7 shows the simulated reflection
coefficient
and configuration of the optimized H-fractal
antenna. The impedance bandwidths at the lower and upper
bands (
dB) are 6.9% (2.392.56 GHz) and 14.5%
(5.105.90 GHz), respectively, which successfully cover the

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IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 13, 2014

of the antenna is well designed and optimized. This could be

done by the ,
,
, , and the stage number.
IV. CONCLUSION

Fig. 7. Simulated reflection coefficient

and configuration of the optimized H-fractal antenna for the 2.45- and 5.5-GHz WLAN application.

A novel planar antenna design that is based on an H-shaped

fractal structure has been proposed. Because the proposed
H-fractal has a simple structure, it is easy for implementation.
The design procedure and rules for guaranteeing absence of
overlapping between strips have been given in this letter.
Results show that the proposed antenna can excite multiple
resonances with reasonable antenna directivity. The operating mechanism of the antenna has been discussed. The PSO
method has been applied to optimize the proposed H-fractal
for 2.45/5.5-GHz WLAN application. Optimized result shows
that the optimized antenna successfully achieves the design
goal. The proposed H-shaped fractal has a great potential for
designing antennas with multiband or wideband features.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank the reviewers for their careful review and
helpful comments.
REFERENCES

Fig. 8. Simulated 3-D radiation patterns (normalized to 0 dB) of the proposed

H-fractal antenna at frequencies of (a) 0.36, (b) 1.32, and (c) 5.50 GHz.

TABLE II
DIMENSIONS OF THE OPTIMIZED H-FRACTAL ANTENNA

2.45-GHz (2.42.497 GHz) and 5.5-GHz (5.155.825 GHz)

WLAN bands. The result demonstrates the practical utilization
of the proposed H-fractal, and the optimized H-fractal antenna
can be applied for the WLAN application.
Fig. 8 shows the simulated 3-D radiation patterns of the proposed H-fractal antenna. An omnidirectional radiation pattern
is obtained in the -plane at the dominant resonant frequency
0.36 GHz. As resonant frequencies increase, the radiation patterns change due to the effects of high-order modes. The antenna peak directivities are 1.91, 3.72, and 7.52 dBi at resonant
frequencies of 0.36, 1.32, and 5.50 GHz, respectively.
Based on the results shown in this study, the proposed
H-shaped fractal antenna not only has multiband feature, but
also the antenna can have wideband feature once the geometry

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