Design and Analysis of Reflectarray Compound Unit Cell for 5G Communication

In this paper, a single-layer compound unit element is proposed for reflectarray antenna design operating in Ka-band (26.5-29.5GHz) at the center frequency of 28GHz. A systematic study on the performance of a compound unit element is examined first. The structure of the proposed unit element is a unique combination of two different shape simple patches i.e. cross dipole and square patches. The desired phase range is achieved due to the multi-resonance of both patch elements with a single layer without any air-gap. The compound unit element is simulated by computer models of CST Microwave studio based on the Floquet approach (infinite periodic approach) and it has achieved 348.589° reflection phase range. Furthermore, the analysis of the reflection phase range, S-curve gradient, reflection magnitude, fabrication tolerance, and surface current density is also simulated and demonstrated. Based on the remarkable performance, the proposed element can be considered as the best element of single-beam or multi-beam reflectarray antenna design for 5G applications.