Invited: Advances in Reconfigurable Antennas for Wireless Communications
Y. Jay Guo
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Abstract
Owing to the rapid proliferation of wireless communications systems and the increasing demand on mobile data, the limited electromagnetic spectrum has become more and more congested. To address this challenge, future wireless communications systems need to be cognitive and reconfigurable. They will have the intelligence and capacity to adopt the most appropriate communications strategy based on the feedback from channel sensing activities and signal quality assessment, including the operating frequency, the beam pattern and the polarization. In order to achieve these flexibilities, reconfigurable antennas (RAs) with adaptive radiation characteristics are required instead of traditional antennas whose structures are tailored to fit particular applications. RAs can also be used to avoid interference, save energy, enhance security, and mitigate signal quality deterioration caused by multipath fading.
Typical parameters of an antenna that can be reconfigured include frequency, polarization, radiation pattern, or a combination of the above. Depending on the reconfiguration mechanisms, RAs can also be classified into three main groups, namely, those using electrical devices, such as PIN diodes, varactor diodes and radio frequency micro electromechanical system (RF-MEMS), and those using mechanical changes and using material changes. In this talk, we shall review the recent progress of RAs using electrical methods to achieve reconfiguration. In particular, we shall review innovations on reconfigurable antenna elements, leaky wave antennas and antenna arrays, with the majority of results from our own research projects. We shall also shed some light on the future development of reconfigurable antennas.
CV
Professor Y. Jay Guo is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), a Fellow of IEEE and IET. Currently, he serves as the Director of Australia Research Centre for Big Data Technologies (ARCDA), and Distinguished Professor at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Prior this this appointment, Jas served as Director of a number of research programs in CSIRO, Australia. Before joining CSIRO, Jay worked in the European mobile communications industry for eight years. His research interest includes reconfigurable antennas, wideband and conformal antenna arrays, base-station antennas and advanced wireless communications systems.