Low-Cost Smart Antenna Using Active Frequency Selective Surfaces

Smart antenna is a key technology for advanced wireless systems and one of the most important features of smart antenna is electronically beam scanning or switching. It is highly desirable to reduce the mass, power consumption and cost of smart antennas, as the traditional phased array is always associated with high cost due to the use of many T/R modules and complicated beamforming network (BFN). This paper presents the University of Kent's recent research progress in the field of low-cost smart antenna design using active frequency selective surfaces (AFSS). Firstly, this paper presents a brief review of AFSS based beam-reconfigurable antenna including several recent designs reported by the authors' group. Then, a new high-gain AFSS antenna design with some preliminary results will be presented. This is design achieves higher gain than the reported AFSS antennas. A detailed list of references is given at the end of this paper.