Aperture-Shared Radiation Surface: A Promising Technique for Multifunctional Antenna Array Development

In the development of a multifunctional and multi-standard analog frontend module in emerging and future wireless systems, multifunction antenna array is an indispensable component. To this end, the aperture-shared technique has come of age, and demonstrated significant advantages in the cost-effective design of efficient, compact, multiband, multibeam, and polarization-diversified antenna arrays, particularly with high frequency ratios. In this paper, various antenna topologies and surface architectures based on this technique, which have been proposed and developed thus far for a wide variety of applications, are reviewed, examined, and categorized to highlight the nature of electromagnetic aperture-shared schemes and merits. Finally, we briefly discuss future research directions in this context for multifunction millimeter-wave and terahertz wireless systems development.