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Design of Fragment-Type Antenna Structure
Using an Improved BPSO
Jian Dong, Member, IEEE, Qianqian Li, and Lianwen Deng
Abstract—An improved binary particle swarm optimization
(BPSO) algorithm is proposed for the design of high-dimensional,
multifunctional, and compact fragment-type antenna (FTA).
First, orthogonal array (OA) based initialization instead of
randomized initialization is employed to uniformly sample the
design space for better population diversity. Then, a new transfer
function with a time-variant transfer factor is proposed to
improve the problem of easily falling into local optimum in basic
BPSO. Experimental results of the two miniaturized FTA designs
show that the proposed BPSO exhibits better convergence
performance than other published discrete optimization
algorithms and can provide excellent candidates for the internal
miniaturized antenna designs in wireless and portable
applications.
Index Terms—fragment-type antenna (FTA), BPSO,
orthogonal array (OA), transfer function, multiband antenna,
band-notched UWB antenna
I. INTRODUCTION
A Sthe key components of modern wireless communication
systems, antennas have to fulfill stringent requirements
imposed upon their geometrical and electrical properties.
Conventionally, antenna designs rely on geometric shape
optimization of a given initial layout. That is, the design
parameters of an antenna structure are first identified, and their
values are optimized via optimization algorithms, e.g., genetic
algorithm (GA) [1] and particle swarm optimization (PSO) [2].
However, such methods may fail to provide a satisfactory
design if the pre-identified initial geometry is not correct.
Instead of optimizing the geometric parameters of a given
initial layout, the fragment-type antenna (FTA) design does not
optimize a particular predefined geometry, yet it automatically
generates a suitable antenna structure fulfilling the design
requirements. The physical shape of an FTA structure can be
described by a matrix where the elements “1” and “0” indicate
Manuscript received September 20, 2016. This work was supported in part
by the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant
2017YFA0204600, in part by the National Science Foundation of China under
Grant No. 61201086, in part by Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology
Project under Grant No. 2013B090500007, in part by the Dongguan Municipal
Project on the Integration of Industry, Education and Research under Grant No.
2014509102205, and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities under Grant No.2017zzts485.
J. Dong and Q. Li are with the School of Information Science and
Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China (e-mail:
dongjian@csu.edu.cn; liqianqian@csu.edu.cn)
L. Deng is with the School of Physics and Electronics, Central South
University, Changsha 410083, China (e-mail: dlw626@163.com)
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metal and nonmetal, respectively. Usually, FTA optimization
presents an unexpected antenna shape, thereby avoiding
designer’s improper biases and creating innovative layouts.
Also, FTA optimization is particularly suitable for the internal
miniaturized antenna designs in wireless and portable products
where the antenna design is usually confined to a given space.
FTA design first appeared in [3] for creating new shapes for
resonant structure by means of GA; then, it has attracted
considerable interest in designing Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) tag antennas [4], [5], microstrip patch
antennas [6]-[10], and MIMO antennas [11]. Wang et al.
designed fragment-type UHF RFID tags [4], [5] for single-band
or multiband operation by using GA or multi-objective
evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). Also, they extended their
MOEA to the design of high isolation fragment-type structure
for MIMO system [11]. In [6], three GA-optimized dual-band
microstrip antennas centered at 1.8/2.34 GHz, 1.8/2.9 GHz, and
1.8/3.42 GHz, respectively, were implemented on the 72
mm×72 mm patch. In [7], a GA-optimized printed monopole
antenna with the overall size of 80 mm×45 mm was presented
to realize the wideband of 1.9-7 GHz. When compared with GA,
PSO’s simplicity, ease of implementation, and flexibility make
it highly appealing for multidimensional antenna designs. In [8],
PSO was used to optimize the shape of microstrip antennas and
a PSO-optimized microstrip antenna with the overall size of 50
mm×50 mm was presented for 5-6 GHz WLAN applications. In
[9], Modiri and Kiasaleh used a modified binary PSO (BPSO)
algorithm proposed in [12] to design several irregularly shaped
microstrip antenna structures for single-frequency or
triple-frequency software-defined radio applications. In [10], a
real-binary hybrid PSO algorithm was proposed to design a
dual-band handset antenna. All these works have some
drawbacks such as involving only a relatively small number of
design variables, and presenting insufficient algorithm
performance or antenna electrical performance.
In this paper, the design of high-dimensional, multifunctional,
and compact FTA is mainly addressed by proposing an
improved BPSO. First, a population initialization scheme based
on an orthogonal array (OA) [13], [14] instead of randomized
initialization is employed to sample the design space as
uniformly as possible for better population diversity. Then, a
new transfer function with a time-variant transfer factor is
proposed to improve the problem of easily falling into local
optimum, especially in the late stage of evolution. The results
of two compact FTA designs for integrated mobile devices
validate the effectiveness of the proposed BPSO.
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II. PROBLEM FORMULATION
FTA discretizes a design space into many small rectangular
cells, and each cell could be filled with either air or conductor.
So, the FTA design can be formulated as a binary optimization
problem:
find x ∗ = arg min f ( x )
x
s .t . x ∈ {0,1}n
where x=[x1,x2,…,xn] is an n-vector of binary design variables,
representing the encoding bit string mapped from a specific
antenna geometry; x ∗ is the optimal design to be found; f(x) is
the objective function, which is related to the desired antenna
performances, such as reflection coefficients, gain, or
efficiency. Fig. 1 illustrates the mapping procedure, where the
small rectangular cells of antenna structure filled with
conductors or air are encoded as 1 or 0, respectively. In FTA
design problems, the objective function values are usually
sensitive to the variation of design variables, which makes it
difficult to find global optimum of the objective function.
III. PROPOSED BPSO
A. Basic BPSO
The binary PSO (BPSO) algorithm proposed by Kennedy
and Eberhart [15] is a good candidate for 0/1 optimization
problems. Different from continuous version of PSO, a transfer
function is used in BPSO to map a continuous space to a binary
one, and a new position-updating procedure is designed to
switch particles’ positions between 0 and 1 in a binary design
space. In BPSO, each particle i is initialized with binary data xi
(viz. position) and randomized velocity vi. At the tth iteration,
each particle i is updated as follows:
vi (t ) = ω vi (t − 1) + c1r1 ( Pbest − xi (t − 1)) + c2 r2 (Gbest − xi (t − 1)) (2)
1 if rand () < S ( vi (t ))
xi (t ) = 
 0 otherwise
1 (4)
S (vi (t )) =
1 + e−vi (t )
where vi(t) and vi(t-1) are the current and previous velocities of
particle i, respectively; xi(t) and xi(t-1) represent the current and
previous values of binary data of particle i, respectively; Pbest
and Gbest are the best individual solution and the best global
solution so far, respectively; ω is the inertia weight controlling
global and local exploration of the particle; c1 and c2 are
learning factors; r1 and r2 are random numbers between [0,1];
S(vi(t)) is a Sigmoid function used to transfer all real values of
velocities to probability values in the segment [0,1]; and rand()
is a random number with a uniform distribution in [0,1]. The
optimization procedure will be updated iteratively until the
maximum iteration number is reached.
There is no doubt that BPSO is a simple and effective
optimization algorithm for discrete optimization problems.
However, the basic BPSO suffers from easily trapping in local
minima. Lee et al. proposed a modified BPSO (named LBPSO)
[16] whereby they allow continuous PSO update of both
velocity and position. However, this algorithm faced the
problem of dropping into local minima so that it was assisted
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Transactions on Antennas and Propagation
(1)
x = {0101010 1111010 00011111111010 0001111}
Fig. 1. The relationship between the physical antenna structure and the
resultant bit string.
with a mutation operator to improve this problem. Later, Modiri
and Kiasaleh introduced another modification of accelerated
BPSO (named ABPSO) [12], which allows BPSO to move
towards the best solution at an accelerated convergence rate.
However, the local search capability is weakened, especially in
the late stage of evolution due to the ignorance of the
information of personal best. Recently, Liu et al. proposed a
binary inheritance learning PSO (BILPSO) [17] for thinned
antenna array synthesis, which provides an inheritance learning
framework for handling different versions of PSO processes.
However, its searching efficiency will become worse when
dealing with a large number of optimization variables because
of the insufficient number of particles for each PSO process.
In our work, by exploiting the characteristics of FTA
structure optimization problem, a new OA-based population
initialization scheme rather than randomized initialization will
be introduced for better diversity. Also, considering its vital
importance in determining the performance of BPSO, the
design of transfer function will be especially addressed.
(3)
B. OA-Based Population Initialization
Usually, we have no a priori information on the location of
the global optimum before solving an optimization problem. It
is favorable that the particles of the initial population be fairly
distributed over the feasible solution space so that the algorithm
can have the best diversity and evenly search along different
directions for further exploration in subsequent evolution. To
equip the initial population with fairly and uniformly
distributed candidates, an OA-based population initialization
scheme instead of randomized initialization is employed.
OA [13], [14] first appeared in combinatorial mathematics
and then found its applications in coding theory, cryptography,
and statistical design of experiments. An OA with strength t,
factor k(k≥t), level v, and index λ, denoted by OA(N; t, k, v), is
an N×k array on v symbols such that every N×t subarray
contains all the ordered subsets of size t from v symbols exactly
λ times. The parameters of the OA are connected by λ=N/vt. The
larger the strength t is, the more rows N the orthogonal array
has. The OA has some appealing properties, for example,
swapping or deleting the columns of an OA does not alter the
orthogonality property of the array. This property facilitates the
construction of an OA for an arbitrary number of factors k.
When applying OA to population initialization for FTA
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structure design, the level v is considered as the number of the 1

states of design variables; so, v is equal to 2 in FTA 0.9

optimization problems. Also, the factor k is the number of 0.8

discretized cells, i.e., the number of design variables. The 0.7

strength t is chosen as 2 for minimizing the number of rows N, 0.6

2/(1+exp(-α v))-1 v>0
which is found to be efficient for the FTA designs. To find the

S(v)
0.5

optimum antenna structure in FTA designs, theoretically, we 0.4

should exhaustively search all the possible structures (the total 0.3 1-2/(1+exp(-α v)) v≤ 0
S1:α =0.5
number is 2k) and then select the best one. When the number of 0.2
S2:α =1

discretized cells k is large, it may be infeasible for the 0.1

S3:α =1.5
S4:α =2

exhaustive search to find the optimal antenna structure. It is 0

-10 -8 -6 -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10

demonstrated that an OA can specify a small number of v

combinations, which are distributed evenly over the space of all Fig. 2. Transfer function curves with different transfer factors.

the possible combinations [14]. Therefore, OA is introduced to visa.

generate the selected candidates, which are good
representatives for all the possible solutions.
Aiming at transferring good OA-derived schemata into the
BPSO population, let us consider the following initialization
step. The positions of the Npop particles of the initial population
(i.e., the initial trial solutions) are generated according to the
OA-based schemata. Specifically, the ith trial solution at the
initialization step is
 OA( N ; 2, k d , 2), 0 ≤ i ≤ N
X 0,i = 
 
 μ  A( N pop − N )×kd  , N < i ≤ N pop
where kd is the actual number of discretized cells,
OA( N ; 2, k d , 2) can be obtained simply by randomly deleting
the excessive k-kd columns from a known OA(N; 2, k, 2) (if
kd≤k); μ  A( N − N )×k  is a randomly mutated version of a block
 pop d 
matrix obtained from OA(N; 2, kd, 2) in order to introduce
several new unexplored solutions into the search space; the
block submatrix A is
 α1T 
 
 α2T 
A=
 
 T  probability.
 αN −N 
 pop 
where α iT =  a i1 , ai 2 ,  , a ik d  , aij ∈ OA( N ; 2, k d , 2)
i = 1, 2,  , N pop − N , j = 1, 2,  , k d .
C. New Transfer Function Design
The main part of BPSO is a transfer function, which is
responsible for mapping particle velocity values to probability
values in [0, 1]. There are some beneficial guidelines in
designing the transfer function including [18]:
i) The return values of a transfer function should be limited
within the segment [0, 1], as they represent the probabilities of
changing the position for particles.
ii) A transfer function should provide a high probability of
changing the position for a large absolute value of the velocity,
and vice visa. Such particles with large absolute values are
probably far from the best solution; so, they have large
probabilities of switching their positions in the next iteration.
iii) The return value of a transfer function should increase
with the increase in the absolute value of the velocity, and vice
Based on these guidelines, a new transfer function is
designed as
 2
1 − 1 + e −α ( t )  vi ( t ) vi (t ) ≤ 0 (7)
S (vi (t )) = 
 2
− 1 vi (t ) > 0
 1 + e −α ( t )  vi ( t )
where α(t) is the time-variant transfer factor expressed by
α −α (8)
(5) α (t ) = αmax − max min
t
where α max and α min are the maximum and minimum transfer
factors, respectively.
To investigate the effect of the transfer factor on the
performance of BPSO, Fig. 2 presents some transfer function
curves with different transfer factors α. It is observed from the
figure that as the velocity increases, the curve with a larger
transfer factor reaches its saturation much faster than that with a
smaller transfer factor. This indicates that a transfer function
with a larger transfer factor provides a higher probability of
changing the particles’ positions for the same velocity, and vice
(6) versa. In Fig. 2, S4 returns the highest probability among them
for the same velocity, whereas S1 provides the lowest
Considering that the population diversity decreases with the
, number of iteration, a time-variant increasing transfer factor
expressed by (8) is designed. Specifically, in the initial stage of
evolution, a relatively smaller transfer factor is used. As the
iteration number increases, a gradually increasing transfer
factor is set to provide a higher probability of changing the
particles’ positions, which is helpful for the particles to jump
out of local minima.
According to the guideline ii) of the transfer function design,
the position updating formula of basic BPSO in (3) is modified
as follows:
( x (t − 1)) −1 if rand () < S (vi (t )) (9)
xi (t ) =  i
 xi (t − 1) otherwise
where (xi(t))-1 denotes the complement of xi(t). This formula
encourages particles to stay in their current positions when their
velocity absolute values are low or switch to their complements
when the velocity absolute values are high.
In brief, the expressions of (7)-(9) guarantee that the
proposed transfer function is able to map the search process

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from a continuous search space to a binary search space while

improving the problem of easily dropping into local minima.
The main steps of our improved BPSO are summarized as
follows:
Step 1) Initialize the population with OA using (5);
Step 2) Evaluate fitness values of particles, and find the
personal best Pbest and the global best Gbest ;
Step 3) Update the velocities of particles using (2);
Step 4) Calculate probabilities for changing the position of
particles using (7) and (8);
Step 5) Update the positions of particles using (9);
Fig. 3. Initial geometry of planar tri-band antenna model (unit: mm)
Step 6) Evaluate the fitness values of updated particles, then
update Pbest and Gbest ;
Step7) Stop when termination condition is satisfied;
otherwise, turn to step 3).

IV. EXPERIMENT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION

In this section, two miniaturized FTA designs for integrated
mobile devices are presented and compared with some similar
designs to verify the effectiveness of our improved BPSO. Also,
the performance of our algorithm in designing FTA structures (a) (b)
is compared with some representative discrete optimization Fig. 4. The geometry of the optimized planar tri-band antenna (a) and the photo
of the fabricated antenna (b).
algorithms, i.e., adaptive GA (AGA) [19], Boolean differential
evolution (BDE) [20], LBPSO [16], ABPSO [12], and BILPSO
-5
[17]. The experiment running environment is based on 64-bit
operating systems, 8 GB RAM, and 3.20 GHz i5 processor and -10

the simulation tools are MATLAB 2015 and HFSS 13. -15
(dB)

-20
A. Planar Tri-band Antenna Design
11
S

-25
Multiband antennas are highly desirable in modern wireless
-30
communications because they can resonate over several bands
and allow integrating different communication standards into a -35 Simulated
Measured

single device. Here, we present a planar tri-band antenna design 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

from an initial antenna geometry shown in Fig. 3, which

Frequency (GHz)

consists of a 16 mm×20 mm rectangular patch and a 20 mm×10
mm rectangular ground plane. The antenna is fed by a 50 Ω
microstrip line and printed on a 20 mm×36 mm FR4 substrate
of thickness 0.5 mm, permittivity 4.4, and loss tangent 0.02.
The design goal is to minimize S11 values of three bands,
covering the entire 2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz WLAN bands and 3.5 GHz
WiMAX band. The objective function can be described as:
1 n
Minimize F =  (Q( fi ))
n i =1
−10, S11 ( f i ) ≤ −10
s.t. Q( fi ) = 
S (
 11 if ), S11 ( f i ) > −10
where fi denote the ith sampling frequencies within the given
operating bands; S11(fi) is the reflection coefficient of sample fi;
n is the total number of samples; and F is the fitness value.
The patch is discretized into 8×10 small rectangular cells and
optimized by our improved BPSO. In this case, the population
size is assigned as N=90, and OA(84; 2, 83, 2) is suitable for
generating the initial population. First, by randomly deleting 3
out of 83 columns in this OA, we can obtain a new OA(84; 2,
80, 2), each row of which is assigned to an individual. Then, the
remaining 6 individuals are assigned by a randomly mutated
version of a 6×80 block matrix obtained from the OA(84; 2, 80,
Fig. 5. The simulated and measured S11 results of the optimized planar tri-band
antenna.
2). Unless otherwise noted, the following BPSO parameters,
which are suggested by previous literature for better
convergence [15], [21], is applicable to all the instances in this
section: fixed inertia weight ω=1, learning factors c1=c2=2,
vmax=6. Besides, the iteration number is set to be Itermax=100.
The suggested combination of [αmin,αmax] is determined by
(10) the parametric study given in Table I. In this table, several
different combinations of [αmin,αmax] are tested for the tri-band
antenna design and each test runs 20 times. Statistical results
show that the performance of the improved BPSO is sensitive
to the values of [αmin,αmax], and αmin=1 and αmax=2 may be
suggested as the applicable combination for the improved
BPSO. The terms in the table are introduced as follows:
Worst Fitness--the worst fitness in the 20 times running.
Success Rate--the percent of finding the optimal solution in
the 20 times running.
Average iteration--the average step of finding the optimal
solution in the 20 times running.
Min iteration--the minimum step of finding the optimal
solution in the 20 times running.

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The final FTA geometry optimized by our improved BPSO TABLE I PARAMETRIC STUDY ON TRANSFER FACTOR IN PLANAR TRI-BAND
ANTENNA DESIGN
and the fabricated antenna are shown in Fig. 4. The simulation
and measured S11 results are shown in Fig. 5, showing good [αmin,αmax] Worst Fitness Success Rate
Average Min
agreement between the simulated and measured results. It is Iteration Iteration
observed from Fig. 5 that the measured operating bands with [1,1] -9.21 80% 66.67 44
S11<-10 dB is 2.15-2.75, 3.25-3.95, and 5.00-6.40 GHz, [2,2] -7.97 30% 90.34 89
covering all the desired bands of WLAN and WiMAX [0.5,2] -8.77 75% 69.82 53
applications. Table II presents the performance comparison of [1.5,2] -8.52 65% 75.98 64
[1,2] -9.85 95% 50.14 26
our design with other recently reported multiband antennas
obtained by the traditional EM simulation method. It can be TABLE II PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF THE OPTIMIZED PLANAR TRI-BAND
concluded from the table that our designed antenna has a ANTENNA WITH OTHER REPORTED MULTIBAND ANTENNAS
smaller size when compared with the other mentioned antennas Size Operating
References Remarks
(mm) Bands (GHz)
with a sufficient bandwidth at all the three bands for covering 2.26-2.42, Large overall size and few useful
the entire WLAN and WiMAX applications. [22] 40×35
3.29-3.6 bands
To further evaluate the effectiveness in designing FTA 2.38-2.52, Narrow bandwidth for few useful
[23] 40×10
3.40-3.62 bands
structure, Fig. 6 presents the comparison of convergence 2.34-2.82,
performance between our improved BPSO and other discrete Missing coverage of 5.8 GHz
[24] 32×28 3.16-4.06,
WLAN application
optimization algorithms, including AGA [19], BDE [20], 4.69-5.37
2.33-2.76,
LBPSO [16], ABPSO [12], and BILPSO [17]. Note that these Missing coverage of 5.2 GHz
[25] 23×36.5 3.05-3.88,
benchmark algorithms initialize the population randomly WLAN application
5.57-5.88
instead of using OA. It can be observed that our improved Optimized
2.15-2.75,
Compact size and sufficient
BPSO shows better convergence than other algorithms because 20×36 3.25-3.95,
antenna bands
5.00-6.40
of its position initialization and update strategies, which are
beneficial to population diversity and global search capability, 0

especially in the late stage of evolution.

AGA
BDE

Table III summarizes the comparison of optimization results -2

LBPSO
ABPSO

obtained by our improved BPSO and the aforementioned Fitness Value(dB) BILPSO
Improved BPSO

benchmark algorithms. In this table, all the reported values -4

were obtained by averaging over 20 trials. Note that antenna

performance evaluation by HFSS occupies most of the average -6

CPU time. The average CPU time was estimated as the

computational time in a complete iteration for a particle. In -8

other words, not all the particles perform a complete antenna

performance evaluation process in each iteration due to the
-10
0 10 20 30 40 50
Number of Iteration
problem of irregular discontinuities of FTA structure (often Fig. 6. Comparison of convergence curves of AGA [19], BDE [20], LBPSO
named as “corner connection” problem [7], [11]). It can be [16], ABPSO [12], BILPSO [17], and our improved BPSO.
concluded that our improved BPSO exhibits the highest success
TABLE III OPTIMIZATION RESULTS OBTAINED BY AGA [19], BDE [20],
rate and the lowest average iteration times without increasing LBPSO [16], ABPSO [12], BILPSO [17], AND OUR PROPOSED BPSO
additional computational cost with respect to other algorithms. Worst Success Average Min Average
Algorithms
To show the effect of the proposed OA-based population Fitness Rate Iteration Iteration CPU time/s
initialization, comparative experiments on different versions of AGA [19] -8.63 80% 68.17 46 31.59
BDE [20] -8.23 75% 71.28 53 31.56
our proposed BPSO using different OA initialization schemes LBPSO [16] -8.07 65% 74.45 40 31.54
(i.e., without OA initialization, with original OA initialization ABPSO [12] -8.82 80% 65.34 36 31.56
[14], and with OA initialization in (5)) are performed and the BILPSO [17] -9.12 85% 67.33 35 31.57
optimization results are summarized in Table IV. It can be Proposed -9.85 95% 50.14 26 31.55
concluded that the proposed scheme of OA-based population
TABLE IV OPTIMIZATION RESULTS OBTAINED BY DIFFERENT OA
initialization leads to better population diversity and hence INITIALIZATION SCHEMES
significantly improves the convergence performance of our Worst Success Average Min Average
OA Schemes
BPSO without adding extra computational cost. Fitness Rate Iteration Iteration CPU time/s
Without OA -8.92 80% 67.18 40 31.54
B. Planar Tri-Band-Notched UWB Antenna Design Original OA
-9.12 90% 59.69 35 31.54
UWB antennas with band-notched characteristics are usually [14]
OA in (5) -9.85 95% 50.14 26 31.55
desirable in UWB communications for suppressing the
interference from narrowband systems such as WiMAX limited space and complicated couplings between the adjacent
(3.3-3.69 GHz) and WLAN (5.15-5.35, 5.725-5.825 GHz). notch-bands. Here, we present a planar tri-band-notched UWB
However, it is difficult for designing multi-band-notched antenna design from an initial antenna geometry shown in Fig.
antennas due to elaborate bandwidth control of notch-bands in a 7, which consists of a 9 mm×9 mm rectangular patch and a 10

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mm×1.5 mm rectangular ground plane. The antenna is fed by a

50 Ω microstrip line and printed on a 10 mm×16 mm FR4
substrate of thickness 1.5 mm, permittivity 4.4, and loss tangent
0.02. The design goal is to offer an ultrawide bandwidth
(3.1-10.6 GHz) with three notched bands, which can avoid the
interference from WiMAX and WLAN systems. The objective
function can be described as
1 n
Maximize F =  (Q( fi ))
n i =1 (11)
−10, S11 ( f i ) ≥ −10 Fig. 7. Initial geometry of tri-band-notched UWB antenna model (unit: mm)
s.t. Q ( fi ) = 
S (
 11 if ), S11 ( f i ) < −10

In this design, the patch is discretized into 18×18 small

rectangular cells and only half of the patch is optimized by our
improved BPSO for the reduced computation cost. In this case,
the population size is assigned as N=180, and the OA(168; 2,
167, 2) is suitable for generating initial population. First, by
randomly deleting 5 out of 167 columns in this OA, we can
obtain a new OA(168; 2, 162, 2), each row of which is assigned
to an individual. Then, the remaining 12 individuals are
assigned by a randomly mutated version of a 12×162 block
(a) (b)
matrix obtained from the OA(168; 2, 162, 2). The other Fig. 8. The geometry of the optimized tri-band-notched UWB antenna (a) and
parameters of BPSO are the same as those in Section IV-A the photo of the fabricated antenna (b).
except Itermax=200. Also, αmin=1 and αmax=2 are suggested by
parametric study as the applicable combination in this design.
The final antenna geometry optimized by our improved
BPSO and the fabricated antenna are shown in Fig. 8. The
simulation and measured S11 results are shown in Fig. 9,
indicating good agreement between the simulated and
measured results. It is observed from the measurement results
that our UWB antenna operates from 2.2 to 14.6 GHz, except
for triple notched bands at 3.32-4.16, 4.88-5.36, and 5.64-6.04
GHz for rejecting the 5.2/5.8 GHz WLAN and 3.5 GHz
WiMAX interferences.
Table V presents the performance comparison of our design
Fig. 9. The simulated and measured S11 results of the optimized
with other recently reported antennas obtained by the tri-band-notched UWB antenna.
traditional EM simulation method, including size, bandwidth,
and notched bands. When compared with other reported In summary, both FTA designs start from a very simple
antennas [26]-[31], our designed antenna has some obvious initial geometry and exhibit an excellent electrical performance
advantages such as a much smaller size, a wider impedance with a very compact size when compared with the previous
bandwidth, and more complete rejecting bands. Note that our similar antennas. It can be concluded that the FTA design given
FTA design consists of regular symmetrical fragments only and by our improved BPSO can provide a satisfactory antenna
is easy to replicate, fine tune, and fabricate, while most of the performance without any structural analysis and parametric
antennas mentioned in the table employ irregular-shaped study and depend only weakly on the initial antenna geometry.
patches and parasitic stubs/resonators as well as etching various Although it usually provides an unexpected antenna shape,
irregular-shaped slots on the patch or ground, which leads to a such a feature is suitable for novel antenna design, especially
complex overall structure and the fabrication difficulty. for antenna design with a limited surrounding environment or
Some similar experiments to the first design are also carried an unexplored area.
out. Fig. 10 presents the comparison of convergence
performance between our improved BPSO and the V. CONCLUSION
aforementioned benchmark algorithms. Table VI summarizes In view of the defects of basic BPSO and the features of FTA
the comparison of optimization results obtained by our BPSO structure, an improved BPSO is proposed in this paper. First, an
and these benchmark algorithms. Table VII summarizes the orthogonal array (OA) rather than a randomized array is
comparison of optimization results obtained by different OA introduced to initialize the population with some representative
initialization schemes. All the results verify the superiority of candidates, which are distributed uniformly in the design space
our proposed BPSO in terms of global optimization capability for better diversity; then, an effective transfer function with a
and convergence rate over other previous algorithms. time-variant transfer factor is proposed to improve the problem

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TAP.2017.2778763, IEEE
Transactions on Antennas and Propagation
>AP1609-1265<

TABLE V PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF THE OPTIMIZED TRI-BAND-NOTCHED UWB ANTENNA WITH OTHER REPORTED BAND-NOTCHED UWB ANTENNAS
References Size (mm) Bandwidth (GHz) Notch Bands (GHz) Remarks
[26] 20×27 2.89-11.52 3.18-3.85, 5.0-6.0 Large overall size and only two notched bands
Large overall size, complicated irregular structure, and only two
[27] 25×20 2.85-12 3.3-3.8, 5.15-5.85
notched bands
Large overall size, complicated irregular structure, and incomplete
[28] 24×34.6 3.1-11 3.4-3.6, 5.1-5.3, 5.7-5.9
rejecting for 3.3-3.69 and 5.15-5.35 bands
Large size, complicated irregular structure, and incomplete
[29] 24×30 2.6-12 3.3-4, 5.15-5.4, 5.8-6.1
rejecting for 5.725-5.825 band
Large overall size, incomplete rejecting for 3.3-3.69 and 5.15-5.35
[30] 26×31.8 2.8-12.6 3.43-3.65, 4.95-5.25, 5.36-5.85
bands
Large size, some irregular structures, and incomplete rejecting for
[31] 25 × 30 3.02–11.1 3.25–3.6, 5.0–5.4, 5.7–6.1
3.3-3.69 band
Optimized Wider operation bandwidth, compact size, sufficient and complete
10×16 2.2-14.6 3.32-4.16, 4.88-5.36,5.64-6.04
antenna band-notched functions

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TAP.2017.2778763, IEEE
Transactions on Antennas and Propagation
>AP1609-1265<

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Lianwen Deng received the B.S. degree
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2011.

Jian Dong (M’14) received the B.S.

degree in electrical engineering from
Hunan University, Changsha, China, in
2004, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering from Huazhong University of
Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan,
China, in 2010.
From 2006 to 2010, he was a Research
Assistant with the National Key Laboratory of Science and
Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, HUST,
Wuhan, China. From March 2016 to March 2017, he was a
visiting scholar at the ELEDIA Research Center of the
University of Trento, Italy. Since September 2010, He has been
an associated professor with the School of Information Science
and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, China.
He holds over 10 innovation patents and has published five
books and over 80 peer reviewed papers on international
journals and conferences. His current research interests include
antennas, wireless communications, and numerical
optimization techniques.

Qianqian Li received the B.S. degree in

electrical engineering from Hunan
University of Science and Technology,
Xiangtan, China, in 2015. She is currently
pursuing the M.S. degree with the Central
South university. Her research interests
include UWB antennas, multiband
antennas, and intelligent optimization
algorithms.

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