Polarization-Reconfigurable Cylindrical Dielectric Resonator Antenna Excited by Dual Probe With Tunable Feed Network

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 7; pp. 60111 - 60119
• Main Authors: Liu, Bei-Jia, Qiu, Jing-Hui, Wang, Chang-Hui, Li, Wei, Li, Guo-Qiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antennas; Bandwidth; Bandwidths; Communications systems; Cylindrical antennas; Cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna; Dielectrics; Feeds; HEM₁₁<italic xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">ᵟ mode; Impedance; P-i-n diodes; Parasitic elements (antennas); Phase shifters; PIN diodes; Polarization; polarization reconfiguration; Probes; Radio antennas; Reconfiguration; Reflection coefficient; Resonators; Switches; Wilkinson power divider
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2915628

A polarization-reconfigurable cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) based on a tunable feed network is presented in this paper. <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\textrm {HEM}_{11\delta } </tex-math></inline-formula> modes excited by two-port side-fed probes are adapted to design the proposed DRA. Polarization reconfigurable characteristic can be obtained by a tunable feed network that consists of Wilkinson equal power divider, parasitic elements used for phase shifters, and p-i-n diodes between them. By controlling the four pairs of p-i-n diode switches to active corresponding elements as effective phase shifters, two sources with equal amplitude and 0° or ±90° phase differences are obtained to generate linear-polarized (LP) or circular-polarized (CP) states, respectively. A fully functional prototype of the proposed antenna with the dimension of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">0.55\lambda \times 0.55\lambda \times 0.14\lambda </tex-math></inline-formula> has been designed, fabricated, and tested. The results indicate that the proposed DRA can achieve the bandwidths of more than 30% for both impedance bandwidth and 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth at CP states, and two LP states with the impedances of 6.3% and 9.5%. Stable directional patterns and realized gains are obtained for all the states. These performances make the proposed DRA suitable for polarization diversity scenarios in communication systems.