Analysis and design of microstrip antenna for a smart-antenna test-bed

by 1977- Venugopal, Arvind

VENUGOPAL, ARVIND. Analysis and Design of Microstrip antenna for a Smartantenna test-bed. (Under the direction of Professor Gianluca Lazzi.) Small planar antennas are becoming increasingly popular in personal wireless communication systems since these antennas offer advantages such as small size, light weight, robust construction, ease of integration into mobile handsets, reasonable radiation efficiency and gain. A new small microstrip antenna operating at 880MHz is designed using the Finite difference time domain technique incorporating the perfectly matched-layer formulation. Shorting pins are used to achieve the reduction in size. The size of this patch antenna is approximately four times less than that of the regular half wavelength patch antenna. An antenna array made of the new patch antennas is used in a multiple antenna system to reliably separate different users on the same channel using linear beam steering techniques with the ultimate goal of increasing the channel capacity. Prototypes of the proposed dual shorted-pin-patch antenna are fabricated and measurements of their return loss compare well with the computational results. ii Biography Arvind Venugopal was born in Kerala, India on Jan. 1st, 1977. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Calicut, India. He came to North Carolina State University where he is currently working towards the Master of Science Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests includes Numerical techniques in Electromagnetics, RF circuits and Wireless Communications. iii