Bacterial foraging optimization technique to calculate resonant frequency of rectangular microstrip antenna

Resonant frequency of rectangular microstrip antenna having various substrate thicknesses are generally calculated using the standard expressions presented in literatures. But these equations suffer from errors when compared with the experimental values due to Quasi-TEM propagation in the microstrip structure and fringing field. A number of researchers used soft computing approach such as neural networks and genetic algorithm on those equations to minimize the error for better accuracy. Bacterial foraging, an evolutionary optimization technique conceived in recent times, has many advantages over genetic algorithm and is yet to be applied on the design of microstrip patch antenna. In this article, a novel technique is developed to apply bacterial foraging optimization technique in conjunction with the expressions developed to calculate accurately the resonant frequency of rectangular microstrip antenna of any dimension and of any substrate thickness. Further, bacterial foraging is applied to the calculatation of the feed point of microstrip antenna. The technique developed in this article can be a generalized soft computing tool to calculate resonant frequency of rectangular microstrip antenna. Similarly, the idea of the article can be used for calculating the various parameters of microstrip antennas of different structure and geometry. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.