Radiation pattern reconfigurable cubical antenna array for 2.45 GHz wireless communication applications

Abstract

In this paper a single-fed four-faced multidirectional compact antenna is introduced for 2.45 GHz indoor wireless applications. Firstly, a slotted patch antenna is designed to operate at 2.45 GHz and its equivalent circuit model is synthesized, and then 2 × 1 patch antenna arrays are modelled and placed over the four faces of a cube structure and the final cube antenna is called as 4 × 2 × 1 antenna array. Meanwhile, a 50Ω fed line is positioned at the bottom of this cube with a power dividing network for the feeding line. For this purpose, a T-junction power divider network is designed at the bottom layer of the cube structure. Besides, the RF switches are located at each arm of four faces to transfer microwave energy selectively to each individual antenna element. Therefore, the reflection and radiation characteristics of proposed compact antenna are analysed to improve the performance under various switching conditions by the numerical analysis. The possibility of controlling selective radiation in a given direction is confirmed. The main advantage of the proposed design is to have capability of radiation control while preserving the reflection coefficient stability by RF switches. Finally, the proposed compact antenna is fabricated using a conventional printed circuit technology and the radiation performance is tested by the experimental measurements conducted. It is observed that measurement results are in a good agreement with the numerical computation results.