A Beam Contracted Dipole Antenna for Massive MIMO System

To cater to the needs of further miniaturization of antenna array in massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) base station of the fifth generation(5G) communication system, a new single dipole is proposed in this paper to replace the original 1 × 2 array. To achieve equivalent substitution, the beam width of a single dipole should be halved. Therefore, a two-layered metasurface equipped with phase gradient property is placed above the traditional dipole. It concentrates the energy radiated from the dipole. The simulated half power beam width(HPBW) of the dipole is decreased to 37°, the simulated gain is enhanced to 14.1 dBi, and the average cross polarization discrimination(XPD) within the main beam is improved by 3.3~8.5 dB. To verify the antenna design, a prototype is manufactured and tested. Good agreement between the simulation and measurement results are obtained. In conclusion, the single dipole with metasurface added can replace the ordinary 1×2 array, equivalent to reduce the ordinary array size by half. The above scheme is very potential in 5G massive MIMO application. © 2022 Chinese Institute of Electronics. All rights reserved.