Low Power Reconfigurable Antenna With Continuous Beam Steering Capability

Each year, the number of wireless devices increases, and the size of the devices’ data is increases, 8k video streaming, for example. More and more bandwidth is needed for wireless networks to meet these growing demands. Higher frequencies allow for more bandwidth; however, using higher frequencies comes with some trade-offs. The higher the wireless signal frequency, the shorter the distance it can travel before the signal strength becomes too weak for the receiver to pick it up. One solution might be to increase the power of the signal provider, but that would waste a lot of energy. Most antennas radiate in all directions, so a lot of that extra power would be going up to space, or just away from the device it’s trying to connect with, or it could be picked up as noise by a device on a different network. Instead, in many areas of research, including the research presented here, the issue is addressed by creating a better antenna. This research presents an antenna that focuses its radiated energy into a beam towards the target device. Focusing the power towards a device increases the signal’s power going towards that device without much power going in undesired directions. If the target device moves, then the beam needs to be steered, so it keeps pointing at the device. The ability for an antenna to change something like the direction of its beam makes the antenna a reconfigurable antenna. Some reconfigurable antennas only have a few beam directions to choose from, so they would have to pick the closest one to the target device. The beam can be steered smoothly through any horizontal direction between two limits for this research. This research uses less power and fewer components to do so compared with some previous works.