Sector Design Using Multiband Antenna With Metamaterial Reflector for Cellular UAV System

Abstract

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is expected to provide a prompt communication service area under disasters and emergencies. Using the multiple frequency bands called carrier aggregation increases the system throughput and can support situations where urgent traffic could explode. We previously developed a multiband sector antenna with multiple reflectors employing the metamaterial for a UAV-mounted mobile base station. The metamaterial reflector, which has electromagnetic band gap (EBG) characteristics, can reflect the electromagnetic waves of the desired band, i.e. EBG band, and transmit those of the specific bands. It has been a challenge to adjust the beamwidth under the constraint of the metamaterial reflector. This paper proposes the beamwidth adjustment algorithm considering the EBG band and evaluates the system throughput performance utilizing the designed multiband sector antenna. The proposed algorithm designed the dual-band sector antenna with 90 degrees beamwidth in the horizontal plane of each frequency band (800 MHz and 2 GHz), and the measurements match the electromagnetic field simulations well. Moreover, the system-level simulation evaluates the system throughput performance utilizing the designed dual-band sector antenna.

Keywords

• Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
• sector antenna
• woodpile metamaterial