Beam Steerable Antenna For 5G Applications

Introduction

Antenna is a metallic device for radiating or receiving radio waves. Antenna is the structure of transition between the free space and guiding device. Antenna is a widely used device whose application ranges from spacecraft, satellite, and missile applications to radio waves and cellular communications [1]. The field of antenna is vigorous and dynamic and with the exponential growth in the field of cellular communications and mobile networking techniques, the mobile data traffic has increased rapidly over the past few years. To meet with the expected demand of higher data rate services in the future, the 5G (fifth generation) cellular system has been largely envisioned and studied. One of the most promising technologies in the 5G system is the implementation of millimeter wavebands. Millimeter waves will only be able to travel short distances so the number of base-stations has to be increased.

There may be a scenario where the signal coming from another station are strong than present base-station here the antenna need to steer the beam and catch signals from the base station with strong signal intensity also keeping in mind that the communication should not be affected during the transition from one station to another this type of antenna is called beam steerable antenna and technology is beam steering which is defined as the changing the direction of main lobe of radiation pattern. The concept of beam steering used for phased array antenna is shown in Fig-1 and radiation pattern in Fig-2. Notable work has been done on high gain beam steering waves mmWave antennas have been actively researched and published [2-3].

Motivation and Need

The driving force for us to choose this topic as our Final Year Project is that there is a lot of ongoing research in the field of (5G) to cope with the robust increase in the number of the cellular users. Printed micro strip antenna (patch antenna) are being used in the implementation of the latest 5G technology because of their light-weight, Compact-size, low-cost, High efficiency and relatively low requirement in their fabrication and integration.

Related Work

The upcoming 5th generation of cellular network (5G) is predicted to have a uniform data throughput across a wide range of user scenarios. With the help of advanced modulation schematics, the implementation of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum will be very significant in increasing the data throughput by more than a hundred times in comparison to the data rate of 4G. Recent research in [5-6] have demonstrated the feasibility of mmWave for cellular network applications. In [7], a 28 GHz picocellular (is a small network that have a small cellular base station typically covering a small area, such as a building or more recently an aircraft. ) network has been devised and studied as of real-world propagation measurements in New York City. The study reports that there is a 15 times data rate increment in comparison to the current 4G cellular network under conventional propagation modeling which includes extensive non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation. However, it is essential to note that a high gain beam steerable antenna solution that can be implemented within a 5G cellular handset device must be realized. Remarkable work on a high gain, beam steerable antennas for mmWave have been frequently researched and published in recent years [8-10].

While implementation of such solution within a cellular handset platform has not yet been reported in literature. The antenna that we will be designing is microstrip antenna because in high-performance spaceship, airplanes, satellite, and missile applications, in which magnitude, mass, price, performance and ease of installation are constraints; low-profile and smart antennas may be required. Currently there are various other government and commercial applications, such as mobile radio and wireless communications that have comparable requirements. To cope with these requirements, microstrip antennas can be used. These antennas are low profile, and are complaint to planar and non-planar surfaces, simple and economical to manufacture using modern printed-circuit technology, mechanically robust when mounted on solid surfaces, compatible with MMIC (Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit) designs, and when the particular patch shape and mode are selected, they are very versatile in terms of resonant frequency, polarization, pattern, and impedance.

In addition, by adding loads between the patch and the ground plane, such as pins and varactor diodes, adaptive elements with variable resonant frequency, impedance, polarization, and pattern can be designed.