A 1-D Steerable Beam Slotted Waveguide Antenna Employing Non-Conventional Aperiodic Array Architecture for mm-wave Line-Of-Sight MIMO

Paper in proceeding, 2019

A 9 x 9 line-of-sight MIMO test setup is presented. The slotted waveguide (WG) antenna as designed for this setup achieves low side-lobe levels (SLLs) in all planes for multiple scanned beams, while minimizing the loss in antenna efficiency and bandwidth limitations. The aperiodic arrangement of several parallel ridge WGs in the E-plane each with a different number of equally-spaced and equally-excited radiating slots along the H-plane, and each possibly integrated with its own TX/Rx module has been optimized through a Compressive Sensing approach. This results in 160 slots organized in 16 columns offering 29 dBi peak gain at a 27.5-31.5 GHz band with a 10 scan range in the E-plane for the ETSI Class-II-compliant beams. The measurements of 12 identically beamformed antenna prototypes for the broadside beam confirm the expected high antenna efficiency (70-90%), and low input impedance mismatch over the entire operating bandwidth.