Transparent Antennas for Aesthetic 5G and Future Wireless Routers

Description

The objective of this project is to provide an original, effective antenna design for emerging wireless 5G WiFi routers, offering high-speed WiFi connections to premises without the need of doing any installations. As compared to traditional designs, the new design will cover the WiFi bands (2.4GHz and 5GHz), and the 5G sub-6GHz (3.5GHz) and millimeter-wave (28GHz) bands with higher performance, fewer antennas, and aesthetic appearance. So far, we have used low-end glass materials to design a single-band 2.4GHz router antenna that has a better diversity gain and radiation pattern than those of using conventional dual-monopole antennas. Since our proposed antenna requires high-quality glass in the millimeter wave band, we will source the suitable glass materials, study their loss characteristics at 28 GHz and above, and optimize the antenna performance for applications in 5G and future wireless routers. By using the polarization diversity instead of the widely-used spatial diversity, the required number of antennas can be reduced by half. Besides, the monotonous straight rod-shaped conductors can be replaced by the beautifully cut, transparent glass artwork. The proposed antenna will allow companies to produce more convenient, higher performance, and visually more pleasing wireless routers for 5G and future wireless technologies.