An adaptive beam steering antenna for mobile communications

Abstract

The development of communication systems intended to satisfy the needs for mobility leads to the use of increasingly complex base stations. The studies presented here are related to the design of a reconfigurable material which will steer the radiation in the angular sectors desired to distribute the services of communications. This new type of base station antenna associates an omni-directional antenna to a cylindrical controllable metallic electromagnetic band gap (EBG) material. The main characteristic of this lattice is to include PIN diodes along the metallic wires in order to control the conductivity of each wire and so the angular sectors where transparency of the cylindrical EBG is needed. After a presentation of the controllable EBG material and the beam steering principle, we present the antenna with the reconfigurable reflector including 1080 diodes and we show the EM performances of this kind of structure