High gain antennas play an essential role in future wireless applications by ensuring sufficient compensation for propagation losses in long-range communication. This work presents a novel design of metasurface-inspired high gain miniaturized antenna for 28 GHz millimeter wave applications. Firstly, to improve the radiation gain of the suggested antenna, only two metallic shorting pins are inserted between radiating patch and ground of antenna.The total size of the proposed shorting pin based microstrip patch antenna is 18 \(\times\) 14 mm2. This approach differs from traditional methods of increasing the radiating area or using bulky techniques. For further gain enhancement, the antenna incorporates a single layer of metasurface made up of a compact and uniquely designed reflecting metamaterial unit cell array. The distinctiveness of these unit cell design is centered on a simple 2 \(\times\) 2 array created by combining circular and hexagonal split rings. This innovative configuration improves antenna gain while maintaining a compact form factor.This metamaterial array is positioned at approximately 0.5 \(\lambda _{0}\) (where \(\lambda _{0}\) is the wavelength in millimeters) above the antenna, thus creating a Fabry-Perot cavity, and substantially improves the gain exceeding 13 dBi.The metasurface, which is made up of specially designed unit cells, modifies the electromagnetic field distribution and surface waves to produce better radiation properties. Furthermore, the final optimized bandwidth achieved is 26.62–29.79 GHz with peak radiation efficiency up to 94%, respectively. The findings provide satisfactory agreement when comparing simulation results with experimental data. The presented antenna system is developed to meet stringent gain requirements for 5G antennas operating in the millimeter wave frequency band.
