Substrate-Integrated Waveguide PCB Leaky-Wave Antenna Design Providing Multiple Steerable Beams in the V-Band

Matthias Steeg,Jonas Tebart,Naruto Yonemoto,Andreas Stöhr

doi:10.3390/electronics6040107

Matthias Steeg, Jonas Tebart + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics6040107

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Abstract

A periodic leaky-wave antenna (LWA) design based on low loss substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) technology with inset half-wave microstrip antennas is presented. The developed LWA operates in the V-band between 50 and 70 GHz and has been fabricated using standard printed circuit board (PCB) technology. The presented LWA is highly functional and very compact supporting 1D beam steering and multibeam operation with only a single radio frequency (RF) feeding port. Within the operational 50–70 GHz bandwidth, the LWA scans through broadside, providing over 40° H-plane beam steering. When operated within the 57–66 GHz band, the maximum steering angle is 18.2°. The maximum gain of the fabricated LWAs is 15.4 dBi with only a small gain variation of +/−1.5 dB across the operational bandwidth. The beam steering and multibeam capability of the fabricated LWA is further utilized to support mobile users in a 60 GHz hot-spot. For a single user, a maximum wireless on-off keying (OOK) data rate of 2.5 Gbit/s is demonstrated. Multibeam operation is achieved using the LWA in combination with multiple dense wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) channels and remote optical heterodyning. Experimentally, multibeam operation supporting three users within a 57–66 GHz hot-spot with a total wireless cell capacity of 3 Gbit/s is achieved.

Highlights

The large available bandwidth at mm-wave frequencies especially in the 60 GHz band enables new use case scenarios such as the 5G hot-spot proposed for the generation of mobile communications (5G) [1,2,3,4]
The usage of directive antennas requires beam steering to enable user mobility and multiple independent beams so that multiple users can be supported in dense user scenarios simultaneously
substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) leaky-wave antenna (LWA) over the beam angle theta in degrees at frequencies of 50 GHz, 57 GHz, 61 multibeam data transmission are presented in theofnext section

Summary

Introduction

The large available bandwidth at mm-wave frequencies especially in the 60 GHz band enables new use case scenarios such as the 5G hot-spot proposed for the generation of mobile communications (5G) [1,2,3,4]. 5G is expected to bring a revolution to mobile communications: a 1000-fold increase in mobile data traffic and a substantially larger number of connected users per cell [5]. This is to be achieved by using a wider RF bandwidth and greater spectral efficiency as cell size is decreased [1,2,3]. These requirements can be met using carrier frequencies in the 57–66 GHz band where a large bandwidth is internationally available. Steerable directive antennas are a key technology for supporting multiple users in dense user scenarios [3,6,7]

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Results

Conclusion