Beam Steering Antenna Using Reconfigurable Partially Reflective Surface

This paper presents a electronically reconfigurable beam steering system. The proposed structure incorporates coaxial feed microstrip patch radiator and a reconfigurable partially reflective surface (PRS). The reconfigurable PRS is mounted over the antenna layer at a height of 27 mm. The PRS layer consists of 6 × 6 reconfigurable unit cells. To make the PRS reconfigurable, PIN diodes are used. To obtain the beam steering, the PRS layer is divided in two sections. The radiating beam can be make tilt by making the individual section ON and OFF accordingly. The complete beam steering system shares a volume of 2.4λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf> x2.4λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf> x0.49λ<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</inf>. The beam steering system obtains measured beam tilting upto ±50°, with a maximum measured realized gain of 11.3 dBi at the operating frequency 5.5 GHz.