Shared Aperture Simultaneous Transmit and Receive Architecture for Reflectarray Antennas

A reflectarray aperture is a planar surface that mimics the parabolic reflector by using a doubly periodic array of carefully designed scatterers. Reflectarray antennas are rapidly becoming an attractive alternative to the traditional parabolic reflector systems due to the primarily application driven requirements and advantages such as size, weight, deployment mechanism, and cost. The major issue with reflectarrays is; however, their narrowband performance and therefore reduced throughput when used for RF communication purposes. To overcome this drawback, Simultaneous Transmit And Receive (STAR) configurations can be deployed. STAR is a technology that allows reuse of the channel bandwidth in a full duplex communication mode, therefore theoretically doubling the channel throughput and improving the spectral efficiency of the system [1] . Reflectarray STAR configuration is particularly useful is commercial applications like satellite communications, repeaters/signal boosters, and 5G, where high gain antenna is required and the available bandwidth is low because of immense congestion of the electromagnetic spectrum [2] .