Beam Steering Architectures for Next-Generation Cellular Wireless Applications

In this paper, recent works of different passive beam steering configurations are reviewed. These systems can be the promising candidates for numerous cellular wireless applications. The first configuration presents an ESPAR-inspired mechanical beam steering antenna with high gain and wide bandwidth performance. This antenna can steer the beam of simple monopole antenna in the entire azimuth plane. However, this structure is unable to steer the beam in the elevation plane. Further, metasurface based beam steering configurations are explored. The concept of metasurface is used initially to design linearly gradient metasurface. This structure can modulate the phase of impinging plane wave results into the beam tilts away from normal direction. Further, the radially gradient metasurface based two more structures are presented. These structures can steer the impinging spherical electromagnetic waves in the both azimuth and elevation planes. The proposed study can establish a new route to design different beam steering antennas for applications such as wireless communication, energy harvesting, microwave imaging etc.