Beam-Switching Antennas for 5G Millimeter-Wave Wireless Terminals

Khaled M Morshed; Debabrata K Karmokar; Karu P Esselle; Ladislau Matekovits

doi:10.3390/s23146285

Beam-Switching Antennas for 5G Millimeter-Wave Wireless Terminals

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jul 10;23(14):6285. doi: 10.3390/s23146285.

Authors

Khaled M Morshed¹, Debabrata K Karmokar², Karu P Esselle³, Ladislau Matekovits^{4

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Affiliations

¹ School of Engineering, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
² UniSA STEM, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, Adelaide, SA 5095, Australia.
³ School of Electrical and Data Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia.
⁴ Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Turin, Italy.
⁵ Istituto di Elettronica e di Ingegneria dell'Informazione e Delle Telecomunicazioni, National Research Council of Italy, 10129 Turin, Italy.
⁶ Department of Measurements and Optical Electronics, Politehnica University Timisoara, 300006 Timisoara, Romania.

Abstract

Beam-switching is one of the paramount focuses of 28 GHz millimeter-wave 5G devices. In this paper, a one-dimensional (1D) pattern reconfigurable leaky-wave antenna (LWA) was investigated and developed for wireless terminals. In order to provide a cost-effective solution, a uniform half-width LWA was used. The 1D beam-switching LWA was designed using three feed points at three different positions; by selecting the feeds, the direction of the beam can be switched. The antenna can switch the beam in three different directions along the antenna axis, such as backward, broadside, and forward. The 1D beam-switching antenna was fabricated, and because of the wide beamwidth, the measured radiation patterns can fill 128∘ of space (3 dB coverage), from θ = -64∘ to +64∘ at ϕ = 0∘. Following this, two of these antennas were placed at right angles to each other to achieve two-directional (2D) beam switching. The 2D beam-switching antenna pair was also prototyped and tested after integrating them into the ground plane of a wireless device. The antenna is able to point the beam in five different directions; moreover, its beam covers 167∘ (θ = -89∘ to +78∘) at ϕ = 0∘, and 154∘ (θ = -72∘ to +82∘) at ϕ = 90∘.

Keywords: 28 GHz band; 5G; leaky-wave antenna (LWA); millimeter-wave; pattern reconfigurable; wireless terminal.

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by the Intel’s University Research Office and in part by the International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) and Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES).