A Wideband Dual-Circularly Polarized, Simultaneous Transmit and Receive (STAR) Antenna Array for Integrated Sensing and Communication in IoT

Abstract

This article presents a novel 5.8-GHz ISM-band dual-circularly polarized (CP) simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) common-aperture antenna array (CAAA) for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in Internet of Things (IoT). A new near-field cancellation technique based on differential feeding and geometrical symmetry is proposed for dual-CP to realize high TX/RX isolation. In addition, a high-impedance surface is introduced to further improve the TX/RX isolation. Furthermore, the parasitic patches are added to enhance the gain and isolation bandwidth (BW). The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CAAA possesses the merits of high isolation (up to 67 dB), wide isolation BW (better than 40 dB for 240 MHz BW), high gains (up to 10/10.5 dB for right-hand CP (RHCP)/left-hand CP (LHCP)), wide 1-dB gain BWs (better than 230/350 MHz BW for RHCP/LHCP), and low-axial ratios (lower than 1.4 dB). The designed CAAAs are fully characterized and the experimental results meet the simulation very well. For the first time, systematic validations for both wireless communication and radar sensing have been thoroughly carried out by integrating the proposed CAAA in the custom-designed full-duplex radio system. The experimental results not only prove the validity of the design methodology but also the feasibility of employing the proposed CAAA for ISAC, which indicates potential applications in IoT era.