A Planar Pattern-reconfigurable Antenna for IEEE 802.11ax Applications

IEEE 802.11ax systems will appear in the market soon and bring significant advancements to existing WLAN technologies. To further enhance their system performance, this paper proposes a planar reconfigurable antenna inspired by the Yagi-Uda structure. It is capable of beam steering by utilizing a switched pixel structure to change the antenna current distribution. Combined with system channel state information the antenna beam direction can be steered towards an active user in order to maximize the gain and therefore improve channel throughput. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed antenna has an impedance bandwidth from 4.6 to 6.0 GHz (26.4%) and achieves a 300°scanning beamwidth with realized gain up to 9.2 dBi.