Reconfigurable antennas: quantifying payoffs for pattern, frequency, and polarisation reconfiguration

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The authors map the differences between various reconfigurable antennas and present a payoff metric for each type. They evaluate three distinct schemes of reconfiguration: pattern, frequency, and polarisation. They show that the often neglected losses play a pivotal role in the effectiveness of reconfigurable systems. For each of the pattern, polarisation and frequency reconfigurable antennas, they define a quantity that reflects the number of non-overlapping radiation patterns, orthogonality of the polarisation states, and the covered fractional bandwidth, respectively. Then, these quantities are divided by the amount of added losses. Thus, these metrics capture both the increased diversity due to the reconfiguration states and the associated losses. Moreover, the relationship between these metrics and the capacity of a communication system is discussed. Finally, application of the payoff metrics is demonstrated by comparing several reconfigurable antenna architectures from the literature. They show that established payoff metrics can be successfully used to evaluate and quantify the merits of reconfigurable antennas by using only antenna parameters rather than going through system-level analysis.