5G Fixed Beam Switching on Microstrip Patch Antenna

Abstract

5G technology is using millimeter-wave band to improve the wireless communication system. However, narrow transmitter and receiver beams have caused the beam coverage area to be limited. Due to propagation limitations of mm wave band, beam forming technology with multi-beam based communication system, has been focused to overcome the problem. In this letter, a fixed beam switching method is introduced. By changing the switches, four different configurations of patch array antennas are designed to investigate their performances in terms of radiation patterns, beam forming angle, gain, half-power bandwidth and impedance bandwidth at 28 GHz operating frequency for 5G application. Mircostrip antenna is preferred due to its low profile, easy in feeding and array configurations. Three different beam directions had been formed at -15°, 0°, and 15° with half-power bandwidth of range 45˚ to 50˚. Keyword: 5G INTRODUCTIONWireless communication has undergone a tremendous evolution to meet the demand of high traffic capacity due to the drastic increasing usage of smartphones and mobile electronic devices. Begin from 0G technology since 1970s, followed by 1G,2G, and 3G, until today 4G technology, they show a great development on mobile technology from Radio Common Carrier (0G-RCC) to Long Term Evolution Advance (4G-LTEA). In order to meet the fast growing wireless data capacity demands due to increasing users of smartphones, high growth in web and streaming, 5G technology now are highly given attention and undergo a huge research. The 5G technology has huge data capabilities to support multi-Gbps data rates and has ability to gather unrestricted call volumes as well as infinite data broadcast within latest mobile technology [1]. Therefore millimeter-wave communication systems are required.Millimeter-wave communication systems using narrow beams at the transmitter and receiver, which suppress the interference of neighboring beams. The narrow beam also strongly reduces the angular spread of the incoming waves and the multipath components of millimeter waves to be limited. Therefore, by having the beam forming, beam-forming weights can be adjusted to a desired area or location [2]. There are two types of beam forming technology. The first one is fixed beam forming and another is adaptive beam forming [3]. Adaptive beam forming forms effective beams by adapting beam width and beam direction depending on the surrounding state of radio channels. It requires high hardware complexity and needs extra feedback mechanism for beam forming. While in fixed beam forming, beams with a fixed direction and width are generated. Therefore, switched beam forming is introduced as it is simpler and lesser operation system than adaptive beam forming. The concepts of beam steering or beam shifting are developed for scanning array antennas. Scanning array antennas were developed initially for aircraft, maritime and