Investigation of the Effect of Fractal Shapes on the Broadband Behavior of 1-dimensional Optimized Antennas

The irregularity has been very attractive to the antenna and packaging engineers. More specifically, the self-similarity has inspired many researchers to use them for broadband designs, due to the fact that a fractal antenna is a repeated shape in different scales, which can be interpreted as a multiscale (“multi-wavelength”) radiator. In addition to this, the space filling property seems to be ideal for the antenna miniaturization. Although many experiments have verified the above properties, there are also counter examples that show the opposite. Comparison of fractal antennas with non-fractal ones that have some common characteristics, such as total wire length and same geometrical dimension, has shown that the last exhibit better behavior. Another drawback of the fractal antennas is that they are not fully realizable since they require infinite resolution. They can be manufactured up to a limited scale known also in the literature as prefractals. Despite the fact that there is no theorem to guarantee that a prefractal shape maintains the same properties with a fractal, it is empirically known that some properties such as fractal dimension is kept by a prefractal if the scale is small enough. For example internet traffic is a fractal curve although it is discrete.