Recent Designs of Metamaterial Embedded Microstrip Patch Antennas for Wireless Applications (Review)

Metamaterials are artificial structures arranged homogeneously. It exhibits the properties of electromagnetic waves not discovered in naturally available materials. These materials play a significant role in developing and applying recent trending technologies. The eminent characteristics of metamaterials (MTM) enhance antenna performance regarding gain, bandwidth, efficiency, and multiband generation. These materials will also help improve the isolation of MIMO antennas. So, metamaterial behavior is embedded in the patch antenna to enhance its performance. This paper reviews recent progress in metamaterials and metasurfaces (MTS) to design curtail antennas, gain-bandwidth enhancement, isolation improvement techniques, miniaturization, and beam splitters. The MTSs are part of MTM in uniform/non-uniform structure arrangement. The MTS structures reduce the surface current distribution and enhance the antenna’s performance based on the arrangement of structures. Nowadays, the demand is for wideband, multi-band, high data rates, and beam-splitting to cover the entire region supported by 5G communication to provide good user services. So, the MTM and MTS structures play a significant role in designing such antennas to meet the challenges of present and future generations in the telecommunication systems.