A Radiation-Pattern Reconfigurable Antenna Array for Vehicular Communications.

This paper presents a low-profile reconfigurable antenna array capable of five radiation-pattern modes for vehicular communication applications. The antenna array consists of four antenna elements, each containing four square patches. Exciting one of the square patches generates a broadside radiation. A square parasitic patch is added at the rear of the excited patch, and two square parasitic patches are placed at the front. By optimizing the design of these parasitic patches, including the treatment of center slotting and addition of shorting pins, the antenna element achieves an end-fire beam with a certain tilt angle. On this basis, a reconfigurable feeding network is designed with 1:1 and 1:4 output modes. By connecting the reconfigurable feeding network to the four antenna elements and altering the on/off states of the PIN diodes in the feeding network, a reconfigurable antenna with four end-fire beams and one omnidirectional beam in its radiation pattern is realized. Measurement results demonstrate an excellent impedance bandwidth, radiation pattern, and gain performance in all modes. The four end-fire and one omnidirectional radiation characteristics make it highly suitable for vehicular communication applications.

A Dual-Polarized Omnidirectional Rectenna Array for RF Energy Harvesting.

In this paper, a dual-polarized omnidirectional rectenna array using a hybrid power-combining scheme is proposed for the applications of RF energy harvesting. In the antenna design part, two omnidirectional antenna subarrays are created to receive horizontally polarized electromagnetic (EM) waves and a four-dipole subarray is produced to receive vertically polarized incoming EM waves. The two antenna subarrays of different polarizations are combined and optimized, so as to reduce the mutual influence between them. In this way, a dual-polarized omnidirectional antenna array is realized. In the rectifier design part, a half-wave rectifying structure is adopted for converting the RF energy into DC energy. Based on the Wilkinson power divider and 3-dB hybrid coupler structure, a power-combining network is designed to connect the whole antenna array and rectifiers. The proposed rectenna array is fabricated and measured under different RF energy harvesting scenarios. All simulated and measured results are in good agreement, which verifies the capabilities of the designed rectenna array.