Co-sponsored by: Poly-Grames Research Center in collaboration with STARaCom and IEEE Montreal Section.

This seminar presents two examples of research subjects pursued at the Antenna Department of Huawei Technologies in Ottawa. The first part of the presentation concerns sub 6 GHz bands for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) access points; and the second part deals with 5G (Fifth-Generation) millimeter-wave systems.

• WLAN smart antennas

A Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) device connects to the network via an access point and wireless communications are permitted over several tens of meters.  The design of commercial WiFi antennas is a compromise between cost, size, manufacturability, and performance. To meet the demand for higher throughput with greater coverage, WiFi access points need to support frequency, polarization, and spatial diversity. For this reason, low-cost multiband, multi-polarization and Multiple Inputs Multiple Outputs (MIMO) antenna technologies form an important research subject in antenna domain. Furthermore, beam switching antennas can bring  significant decrease in the rate of interfering signals and  improvement of capacity,  by  having  antenna  beams  away  from  co-channel access points.

This work shows the analysis, design and experimental results of MIMO antenna arrays with dual polarized beam switching collocated antennas using PIN diodes for WLAN systems. Each antenna element can have both omni-directional mode and directive mode.

• Beam steering with integrated frequency selective structures

5G mm-wave technology brings a new paradigm of wireless communication in different domains including mobile devices, IoT (Internet of Things), automotive, and medical. Silicon-based mm-wave phased-array antenna solutions, with their electronic beam-forming and beam-steering capabilities, compact form factor, and affordability, are particularly suitable for fifth generation.

Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSSs) have many applications in microwave components and systems, such as in antenna radoms, furtive military planes, microwave ovens etc. A substrate integrated version of an FSS in a parallel plate waveguide, as proposed in this work, can be called a frequency selective structure. 

In conventional planar phased arrays, the gain decreases significantly when the steering angle increases. At 30° steering angle, the gain is usually already 3 dB lower than the gain at the direction normal to the array, and it is usually not possible to steer a high gain beam at 90° with such planar arrays. To increase the angular range, a solution consists in using several phased arrays in order to cover different sectors and to increase the angular range to 180° or 360°. However, this solution increases significantly the cost of the system.  

This work proposes a new type of mm wave beam-steering antennas that permits large steering angular range and almost no gain dispersion versus steering angle. The main principle consists in using substrate integrated frequency selective structures and dual polarized conformal arrays.

Speaker(s): Halim Boutayeb ,

Location:
Room: M-2103
Bldg: Pavillon Principal
École Polytechnique de Montréal
2500, chemin de Polytechnique Montréal,
Montreal , Quebec
H3T 1J4