Design of a Microstrip Filtering Antenna for 4G and 5G Wireless Networks

The filtering antenna provides both radiation and filtering features and is an important component for the RF front-end of wireless devices. The main function of a filtering antenna is to reject out-of-band signals, thus reducing the interference from adjacent channels. The aim of the present work is to design a 2.6 GHz microstrip filtering antenna for 4G and 5G global mobile services. The filtering antenna is designed using a hairpin bandpass filter integrated with an elliptical microstrip aerial. Good impedance matching is obtained by using appropriate dimensions of the hairpin bandpass filter. The 10 dB return loss bandwidth of the filtering antenna is approx. 5.7%, with the maximum gain for the elliptical filtering antenna of approx. 2.2 dB. Good agreements between the measured and simulated results are obtained for the proposed filtering antenna and the bandwidth covers almost the entire 2.6 GHz band.