Design and Fabrication of Wideband Dual-Polarized Dipole Array for 5G Wireless Systems

Abstract

This paper presents simulation and measurement results of a wideband planar phased array for 5G. The desired wideband operation is achieved using a tightly coupled dipole array (TCDA). The proposed array consists of tightly coupled dipole units in dual-polarized configuration, and two thin parasitic layers separated apart by air gap for wide-angle impedance matching (WAIM). The top matching layer is loaded with a metasurface composed of sub-wavelength split-ring resonators (SRRs) to improve the scanning performance of array. The infinite array achieved a bandwidth from 23.5 to 29.5 GHz, with voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) < 3 for scan up to ±60°in E, H and D-plane. The array has a height of only <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.144\lambda _{l}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , and it exhibits high gains, high efficiency >71% (largest scan angle) and good cross-polarization. The simulations are validated by fabrication and measurement of an array prototype, which indicates agreement to simulated values. The proposed dual-polarized antenna array can be deployed in the future beam scanning applications for 5G.