Performance Enhancement of Reconfigurable Metamaterial Reflector Antenna by Decreasing the Absorption of the Reflected Beam

Abstract

In this study, a new concept for a Ka-band 5G communication tunable reflector metasurface (MS) for beam steering at 28 GHz is proposed. Varactor diodes are used as the tunability component of each unit cell of this MS. Significant improvements in beam steering and bandwidth performance were achieved using this new concept referred to as the stripes configuration. Several different geometries of unit cells arranged in stripes were designed to achieve better performance in directionality, gain, sidelobe level (SLL), and bandwidth in the stripes configuration. Simulation results for a three-stripe MS with different unit cells in each stripe showed better performance in the phase dynamic range and reduced reflectance losses compared to a typical one-stripe MS. The simulation results showed a significant improvement of 3 dB, depending on the steering angle in reflectance gain, compared to a uniform MS (one stripe). Furthermore, a significant improvement of approximately 50% in the accuracy of the steering angle for different operating frequencies was demonstrated. Manufacturing considerations are discussed in this study.