A Beam-Steering Dielectric Resonator Antenna without Beamforming Network

Abstract

A novel beam-steering dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) without beamforming network is presented in this paper. Instead of adopting the most common way of combining array antennas with beamforming networks to achieve beam steering, the proposed DRA has a very simple structure, with only a single rectangular dielectric resonator (DR) as its radiator. Three microstrip lines are employed to feed the DRA through three slots etched on the ground plane respectively. Between every two microstrip lines lies a decoupling network to improve the isolation of the ports. When one of the three ports is excited and the other two are terminated to 50 Ω impedance, the radiator is fed accordingly at different positions and can generate three different tilted radiation beams in total. As a result, beam steering can be achieved using a single DRA without beamforming network. For demonstration, a single beam-steering DRA without beamforming network working at 5.25 GHz is designed and simulated. The proposed antenna has a bandwidth of 5% and an isolation higher than 15 dB at the center frequency. The three main beams are tilted to -40°, 0° and 40°, with an antenna gain of around 7.45 dBi.