Frequency Selective Surface Based Beam Steering Antenna for 5G Applications

Abstract

5G is the latest iteration of cellular communication designed to increase the speed, receive high data rate, improved voice quality and responsiveness of wireless networks. With this advancement in technology there is also need for miniaturization and multifunction in the modern systems. The quality of communication can be considerably improved by integrating more and more electronic systems into a single platform at a cost of interference problem. Radiation pattern reconfigurable antennas have received a lot of interest as a way to solve this problem and enhance overall system performance. Traditional approaches for building radiation pattern reconfigurable antennas based on phase shifters and phased array antennas suffer from significant loss and are difficult and expensive to implement in practice. For this issue, frequency selective surfaces (FSS) made up of periodic or non-periodic structures work as a filters to electromagnetic (EM) waves, which can be either be reflected or transmitted in the operating frequency band. As a result, in this thesis radiation pattern reconfigurable antennas are realized using frequency selective surfaces. This method provides more antenna capabilities at a lower cost, as well as a significant reduction in size. Owing to these benefits, study in this domain is critical, and it is currently one of the most popular. In this thesis, a compact micro-strip patch antenna integrated with active frequency selective surfaces (AFSS) have been presented. The AFSS unit cell reflection and transmission characteristic is the key influential parameter that affects the beam steering functionality. Therefore, a square looped patch connected to mesh grid via diodes have been proposed. By controlling the switching of PIN diodes in the different sections of AFSS, beam steering can be achieved up to ± 47°in the azimuth plane with a gain of 9.1 dB and 10.2 dB and ± 15° steering in an elevation plane with a gain of 9.3 dB and 8.9 dB respectively.