To improve the gain of microstrip antenna, it can be realized by artificially introducing metamaterials into microstrip antenna. This paper introduces four kinds of metamaterial structures, such as dendritic-type, cross-type, s-type and h-type. All can improve the antenna performance in varying degrees. Based on the analysis and comparison of the simulated results, we found that the dendritic-type metamaterial microstrip antenna has the most remarkable influence on increasing of the antenna gain with the bandwidth basically unchanged. At last, the simulated results were compared with the measured results. The good agreements can be observed.