Design of a Multi-Band Microstrip Textile Patch Antenna for LTE and 5G Services with the CRO-SL Ensemble

Abstract

Featured Application: A novel textile U-shaped with concentric annular slot antenna prototype for LTE and 5G services has been described. In the ground plane, a meander slot has been introduced to reduce the antenna dimensions. A new multi-method metaheuristic algorithm, the Coral Reefs Optimization with Substrate Layer CRO-SL, has been used to optimize the antenna parameters and improve its performance in the frequency bands of interest.Abstract: A textile multi-band antenna for LTE and 5G communication services, composed by a rectangular microstrip patch, two concentric annular slots and a U-Shaped slot, is considered in this paper. In the ground plane, three sleeved meanders have been introduced to modify the surface current distribution, leading to a bandwidth improvement. The U-Shaped slot, the dual circular slots, and the meanders shape have been optimized by means of the Coral Reefs Optimization with Substrate Layer algorithm (CRO-SL). This population-based meta-heuristic approach is a kind of ensemble algorithm for optimization (multi-method), in which different search operators are considered within the algorithm. We show that the CRO-SL is able to obtain a robust multi-band textile antenna, including LTE and 5G frequency bands. For the optimization process, the CRO-SL is guided by means of a fitness function obtained after the antenna simulation by a specific simulation software for electromagnetic analysis in the high frequency range. Keywords: antenna design; constrained optimization problems; coral reefs optimization algorithm; meta-heuristics Recently, the implementation of different kind of antennas in wearables has been massive [6][7][8][9]. Microstrip patch antennas are frequently used in textile materials because of their many advantages, such as low profile, light weight, and conformity. However, these kind of antennas suffer from important issues in their design process (precise value and model of fabric dielectric constant for simulations, difficulty to glue metallic parts to textile materials, bending and moisture influence in antenna performance, etc.), causing severe limitations in their practical applications. This fact is even more dramatic in the frequency bands of modern communication systems based on LTE and 5G technologies. The number of parameters to be tuned in order to make the antenna feasible for working in LTE and 5G applications is usually very high. In these cases, classical optimization methods are no longer suitable, and the employment of advanced optimization algorithms (mainly meta-heuristic approaches, among others) has been shown to be very useful for antenna design [10][11][12][13][14].In this paper, we propose a new model of microstrip textile patch antenna, a multi-band device that can be tuned for LTE and 5G services, among others. Specifically, the proposed antenna is composed by a rectangular microstrip patch with two concentric annular slots and a U-Shaped slot, with sleeved meanders introduced in the ground plane to modify the surface current distribution, leadi...

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Miniaturized Broadband-Multiband Planar Monopole Antenna in Autonomous Vehicles Communication System Device

“…However, the antenna design can be implemented in multiple frequency bands with antenna size minimization. Different generating frequency bands have been proposed in a single antenna, such as double L-slit, inductive slot [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

A Multi-User Interactive Coral Reef Optimization Algorithm for Considering Expert Knowledge in the Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem

“…These kinds of algorithms can be classified as bio-inspired evolutionary algorithms and they simulate the processes occurring in natural coral reefs, such as reproduction, fighting for space, and depredation, which results in a sort of combination of Simulating Annealing and a Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm [40]. The CRO has been successfully applied to a number of areas, such as the analysis of time series [41], optimization of antennas for LTE and 5G services [42], selection of representative measuring points for temperature field reconstruction [43], data clustering [44], Wi-Fi channel assignment [45], materialized view selection in a data warehouse [46], and optimization of convolutional neural networks [47], among others.…”