Compact Leakage-Wave Antenna Design and Measurement Analysis in Highway Tunnel at N41 band

In this letter, to meet the small wind load area requirement in a highway tunnel scenario, a compact leakywave antennas (LWA) end-fire array is designed and machined. The LWA utilizes an offset double-sided parallel strip-line (DSPSL) structure as leaky waveguides, and two short vias at the end are used for impedance matching instead of port loading. The effect of the via parameters are analyzed. Moreover, the average reference signal received power (RSRP) at N41 band (2.496GHz-2.69GHz) in a realistic highway tunnel at Fujian are measured by a handheld terminal device. The coverage performances between traditional leaky cables (LC) and different polarized LWA are compared under the highway tunnel environment. The path loss, shadow fading and secondorder statistics channel parameters are extracted and analyzed. It shows that the high gain LWA owns a higher RSRP compared to LC. Dual-antenna polarization diversity reduces small-scale fading. Distributed antenna diversity shows RSRP is more sensitive to distributed distance, and the coverage enhancement of dual-polarization distributed diversity is not significant.