Compact Filtering Dielectric Resonator Antennas for Wireless Communications

Description

For a wireless communication system, the antenna is a very important part because itdirectly affects the efficiency of signal transmission and reception. Filter is alsoindispensable for a wireless communication system for it is needed to reduceinterferences between signals from different frequency bands. In addition, a filter isneeded to suppress noise before processing the signal. Since inserting a filter willinevitably introduce insertion loss, it is of great interest to integrate antenna with filter toavoid or minimize such loss. The integration is called filtering antenna. By using thefiltering antenna, the overall system loss can be reduced and thus, the systemperformance can be improved.Recently, the dielectric resonator (DR) antenna (DRA) has been studied extensively dueto a number of advantages such as its low loss, small size, low cost, and ease of excitation.Thus far, only a single filtering DRA has been reported, which is only a single-band andsingle-polarization design. In this project, a more comprehensive study that consists ofdifferent filtering DRAs will be carried out. The antenna-fusion approach will be used todesign the proposed filtering DRAs. Using this approach, a filter response can beobtained by introducing parasitic elements or resonators to the antenna or its feednetwork. Since it does not require any external filters, the design is more compact withlower loss.In this project, different compact filtering DRAs will be investigated for the first time. Anovel broadside and simple filtering DRA will be studied first, and the design will beused to develop a diversity filtering DRA to tackle multi-path problems. Next, anomnidirectional filtering DRA for larger signal coverage will be designed. Based on it,wideband and dualband omnidirectional filtering DRAs will also be designed. Finally,substrate-integrated filtering DRA and its array will be investigated, which are fabricatedwith substrate and, thus, can be integrated with circuit easily and directly.ANSYS HFSS will be used to simulate each filtering DRA and the results will verifiedby measurements. Guidelines will be provided to facilitate designs of the filtering DRAs.?