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Circularly polarized antenna array design with the potential of gain-size trade-off and omnidirectional radiation for millimeter-wave small base station applications

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Abstract

This paper presents the design and validation of a slot-patch-hybrid circularly polarized antenna array for 28 GHz millimeter (mm) wave (mm-wave) applications. The proposed design has a simple geometry that facilitates the fabrication process, which is otherwise a challenging task due to the sub-mm dimensions of the circuit in the mm-wave band. In the proposed structure, aperture-coupled series slot-fed array is utilized to excite the 45° inclined pair of patches. The feeding array aperture is designed by printing a straight microstrip feed line with a matching stub at the open end. Further, a coupling slot is etched underneath the feed line in the conventional horizontal position, and two vertical slots are merged toward each end of the slot. For realization of the series phased array of (1 × (4 × 2)) elements, the slots are placed half guided wavelength away extending the array network along the feed line. A pair of the radiating patches are loaded on the top of the vertical slots. To ensure excitation of the 90° phase-shifted orthogonal field components of equal magnitude, the loaded patches are rotated by 45° in the azimuth plane. The produced circularly polarized (CP) fields are further refined by an additional diagonal radiating slot etched in the middle of the pair of radiating patches parallel to the non-radiating edges. With the combination of radiating patches and the slots, a wide axial ratio bandwidth of 27.5–28.5 GHz, broad impedance bandwidth, a highly directional beam, and a peak realized CP gain of 15.15 dBic is achieved. For realizing omnidirectional radiation pattern necessary for the base station applications, 3-dimentional hexagonal/octagonal topology is utilized in six- and eight-antenna configurations. A detailed theoretical and numerical analysis and the corresponding results shows that the adjacent beams could be merged together constructively to form omnidirectional radiation patterns. The advantage of the proposed technique is the ease of implementation without affecting the major performance figures.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Icelandic Centre for Research (RANNIS) Grant 206606 and by National Science Centre of Poland Grant 2018/31/B/ST7/02369. The authors would like to thank DassaultSystemes, France, for making CST Microwave Studio available.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Networks and Communication Engineering Department, Al Ain University, P.O. Box (112612), Abu Dhabi, UAE

    Ubaid Ullah

  2. Engineering Optimization and Modeling Center of Reykjavik University, Reykjavík, Iceland

    Slawomir Koziel

  3. Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdansk University of Technology, 80-233, Gdańsk, Poland

    Slawomir Koziel & Anna Pietrenko-Dabrowska

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  1. Ubaid Ullah
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Correspondence to Ubaid Ullah.

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Ullah, U., Koziel, S. & Pietrenko-Dabrowska, A. Circularly polarized antenna array design with the potential of gain-size trade-off and omnidirectional radiation for millimeter-wave small base station applications. Wireless Netw 29, 413–422 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-022-03134-2

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