Design of Efficient Millimeter Wave Planar Antennas for 5G Communication Systems

Abstract

Fifth generation (5G) is the next major phase of mobile telecommunications standards beyond the current 4G, which will operate at millimeter-wave frequency band. In any wireless device, the performance of radio communications depends on the design of an efficient antenna. This thesis presents designs for microstrip antennas (single element and arrays at 28 GHz), where 28GHz is one of the standard frequencies of the 5G communications. A parametric study to select the best single element design to use it in the array has been performed. The study included investigation on the impact of feeding technique, substrate dielectric constant, substrate thickness and substrate loss tangent on the antenna parameters. Different feeding techniques are studied, and gap-coupled feeder has been found the best in terms of bandwidth that is greater than 1 GHz. Based on the best optimized single element patch, several microstrip antenna array designs at 28 GHz are proposed with number of elements up to 16 and those designs meet the requirements of 5G antennas. Commercial simulation software (CST) and (ADS) were utilized to design single element, linear and planar arrays. Furthermore, dual polarized Linear and planar arrays were designed for handset mobiles and base stations respectively, with good isolation between vertical and horizontal ports (better than 20 dB).