A Reconfigurable Antenna With Beam Steering and Beamwidth Variability for Wireless Communications

Abstract

Abstract-A reconfigurable antenna (RA) capable of steering its beam into the hemisphere corresponding too }, and of changing 3-dB beamwidth, whereo } for broadside direction is presented. The RA operating in 5 GHz band consists of a driven patch antenna with a parasitic layer placed above it. The upper surface of the parasitic layer has two pixelated metallic strips, where each strip has four pixels. The pixels connected via PIN diode switches enable to change the current distribution on the antenna providing the desired modes of operation. A prototype RA was characterized indicating an average gain of 8 dB. Measured and simulated impedance and radiation patterns agreed well. The proposed RA offers an efficient solution by using less number of switches compared to other RAs. The system level simulations for a 5G orthogonal frequency division multiple access system show that the RA improves capacity/coverage trade-off significantly, where the RA modes and users are jointly determined to create proper beamwidth and directivity at the access point antennas. For a hotspot scenario, the presented RA provided 29% coverage and 16% capacity gain concurrently.

Leaky-Wave Antenna With Switchable Omnidirectional Conical Radiation via Polarization Handedness

“…Hence, the beam direction can be steered by sweeping the operating frequency. Although frequency-scanning is used in sensing/radar applications [12]- [15] it is not a desirable feature in modern communication systems, which usually require pattern reconfigurability with fixed frequency operation [16], [17].…”

Three-Dimensional Beamsteering Low-Complexity Reconfigurable Multilevel Antenna

“…Cost and reliability criteria have led to recent modifications of the PL concept, aiming to reduce the number of switches and thus the complexity of design. Three examples of simplified PL are [10][11][12]. The design outlined in [12], despite using a very reduced number of switches, is bandwidth limited.…”

A Novel Linear Sparse Array with Reconfigurable Pixel Antenna Elements

“…Since frequency reconfigurable antennas allow frequency hopping and dynamically allocating spectrum, while radiation pattern and polarization reconfiguration can filter the in-band interference to increase the channel capacity, we think the compound reconfigurable antenna can be the right choice to address the drawbacks mentioned above existing in current reconfigurable phased array antennas. en, the key problem becomes how to design reconfigurable antennas with individually tuning frequency, radiation pattern, and polarization [9][10][11][12].…”