In this paper, a compact asymmetric coplanar strip (ACS)-fed monopole antenna is presented. The proposed antenna consists of a tapered shaped radiating element and a meta-atom (complementary split ring resonator-CSRR), loaded in the ground plane which helps in obtaining multiband characteristics with proper impedance matching performance. Antenna with dimensions of 25 × 12.2 × 1.6 mm3 has been designed, fabricated and tested. The experimental result that exhibits of −10 dB impedance bandwidth by the proposed antenna at the center frequency of 2.88 GHz (1100 MHz), 5.78 GHz (1940 MHz) and 7.64 GHz (660 MHz). It covers wireless applications namely wireless local area network (WLAN) 2.4/5.2/5.8 GHz, long-term evolution (LTE) LTE 2.5 GHz, public safety applications 4.9 GHz, worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) 5.5 GHz, wireless access for vehicular environments (WAVE) 5.9 GHz and X-band downlink frequency band 7.5 GHz. The antenna has good radiation characteristics in both E-plane and H-plane for all the operating frequencies. The proposed antenna exhibits a better performance compared to the previously reported designs to the existing antenna designs which are discussed in the literature. Moreover, the antenna possesses compact size, the total size occupied by the design is 0.20λ0 × 0.1λ0. © 2018 Elsevier GmbH