Enhanced beamforming techniques for cylindrical-substrate microstrip array antennas

Abstract

Purpose A class of robust and efficient beamforming methods is developed in this paper for the optimised design of realistic microstrip antennas on arbitrarily curved substrates. More specifically, this paper aims to focus on the formulation of an effective and computationally light beamforming algorithm and its implementation on a novel realistic cylindrical-substrate microstrip array antenna with significantly decreased size, wideband operation and enhanced radiation characteristics. Design/methodology/approach The proposed multi-parametric schemes introduce an efficient null-steering concept, which drastically annihilates the undesired beamformer waveform artefacts, while retaining the real output signal undistorted. In particular, the key objective is the accurate calculation of the appropriate complex feeding weights, required to set nulls along the propagation directions of the unwanted signals and a maximum towards the propagation direction of the desired incoming signal. The featured technique, combined with a modified finite element method, is applied to the design of a new family of cylindrical-substrate microstrip array antennas. Findings Numerical results, mainly concerning customisable three-dimensional radiation patterns and attributes, certify the merits of the algorithm and its limited system demands. The introduced beamforming algorithms are applied to a variety of different inputs (desired radiation patterns), which indicate that the designed cylindrical-substrate antenna overwhelms existing designs in terms of computational cost for the beamforming algorithm, while retaining acceptable values for radiation characteristics, such as gain, directivity and side-lobe suppression. In this manner, the effectiveness of the prior methodology and the benefits of this newly shaped array antenna are comprehensively revealed and substantiated. Originality/value Rigorous beamforming techniques in conjunction with a class of contemporary array antennas are developed for potential use in high-end communication systems, such as 5G configurations. The proposed cylindrical-shaped structures are systematically designed, with an emphasis on space efficiency and wideband radiation effectiveness to offer fully adjustable setups. To this aim, the cylindrical-substrate microstrip antenna, because of its inherent azimuthal symmetry and confined overall dimensions, provides reliable operation and promising performance.