Planar Beam-Steering Dielectric Resonator Antenna Based on Hybrid Excitation Method

This letter proposes a pattern-reconfigurable dielectric resonator antenna based on a hybrid excitation method. It intelligently combines the equivalent Huygens source and the biased feed to effectively reduce the antenna dimensions while providing rich radiation patterns. Four p-i-n diodes are placed into the feeding network and the slot. By controlling the on/off states of these p-i-n diodes, the radiation beams can be switched between five different states, including four states of the tilted beams and one state of the broadside beam. A highlight of this work is that most horizontally polarized (HP) antennas have only 1-D reconfigurable patterns, while this design achieves 2-D reconfigurability of the HP beam. The dimensions of the antenna are 0.35 lambda(0) x 0.31 lambda(0) x 0.15 lambda(0) (where lambda(0) is the wavelength in free space at 2.42 GHz). A prototype is fabricated and measured. Good agreement between the measured and simulated results is achieved. The measured results show that the -10 dB impedance bandwidth can cover 2.4 GHz to 2.48 GHz in all the five states. The antenna has a stable gain throughout the overlapping bandwidth, with a peak gain of 5.15 dBi. The proposed antenna is characterized by small-size, low-cost, and flexible beam steering, making it a good candidate for intelligent Internet of Things/6G applications in the Wi-Fi band.