This article presents the design and implementation of a high-gain tunable dual-band pattern reconfigurable antenna for vehicular communications. The proposed antenna consists of a slotted patch loaded with a double-side FSS acting as superstrate. The proposed slotted antenna operates at 2.45 and 3.5 GHz and the frequency tuning over the dual-band is accomplished by employing a varactor diode for tuning the center frequency from 2.41 to 2.62 GHz and from 3.38 to 3.65 GHz at lower and upper frequency bands, respectively. To obtain pattern reconfiguration, the slotted patch is divided into four regions by using two diagonal lines of vias. By properly choosing the excitation port combinations, 14 different radiation patterns are realized with a maximum realized gain of 8.4 and 7.9 dB. Further enhancement of gain is achieved using frequency-selective surface (FSS) screens which act as a partially reflecting surface. The unique feature of this design is to provide reflection coefficient with high reflectivity in two predetermined frequency ranges. The prototype antenna is fabricated and the measurement results are reported. The experimental results show that the prototype antenna with FSS offers tunable dualband with beam reconfigurable properties. K E Y W O R D Sfrequency-selective surface, multipattern antenna, pattern reconfiguration

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This article presents the design, fabrication, and testing of a broadband directional slot antenna and its application in a vehicular environment. The proposed antenna consists of a slot antenna fed by a simple microstrip line. Broadband impedance matching is achieved by replacing the conventional microstrip line with a modified microstrip line. The modified microstrip line consists of a microstrip line terminated with an impedance transformer and a square patch. The proposed antenna offers 76.9% bandwidth centered around 4.8 GHz covering most of the communication applications between 3 and 6.75 GHz. Furthermore, the antenna's radiation pattern is shaped to obtain the desired directional characteristics using a simple reflector and array of via holes. The typical gain enhancement is 2.45 dBi at 5 GHz. This gain enhanced slot antenna is further used to construct the four‐element MIMO antenna. The proposed MIMO antenna configuration offers omnidirectional coverage with realized antenna gain greater than 6 dBi making the antenna more suitable for the vehicular environment. The prototype antenna and the MIMO array are fabricated and measurement results are presented. The measurement results are in good agreement with the simulation results.

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This article presents the design of a pattern switchable patch antenna for vehicular applications. The proposed antenna has a square patch that is divided into four triangular regions using diagonal rows of vias. The triangular regions are separately excited using a coaxial feed to achieve frequency and pattern reconfiguration. Each triangular section of the antenna has “U” shaped and inner rectangular strips to obtain two resonant frequencies of 2.4 and 3.5 GHz, respectively to cover the part of WLAN, WiMax, and car‐to‐car communication ranging from 3.4 to 3.8 GHz. In order to cover the maximum bandwidth of WLAN and WiMax standards, frequency tuning is done using a varactor diode. Upon exciting any one of the port, the antenna generates a tilted beam with a peak gain of 6.8 and 5.8 dBi at 2.45 and 3.5 GHz, respectively. A full azimuth beam coverage can be achieved by exciting the ports sequentially. The antenna is also capable of generating eight other beams using multiple feed excitations with the maximum gain of 8.4 and 9.4 dBi for the axial beam at 2.45 and 3.5 GHz, respectively.

The design, analysis, fabrication, and testing of a four-port multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna is reported in this paper for automotive communications. The MIMO antenna is constructed using the basic antenna element exploiting a slot geometry. Two such antennas are developed on the same microwave laminate to develop a two-port MIMO antenna. Two such microwave laminates are interlocked to create the four-port MIMO scheme. The most distinct feature of the proposed architecture is that the inter-port isolation is well-taken care without the need for an external decoupling unit. The four-port MIMO antenna has an overall volume of 32 × 15 × 32 mm3. The prototype MIMO antenna is fabricated and the measurements are carried out to validate the simulation results. The antenna offers ultra-wideband (UWB) characteristics covering the frequency range of 2.8–9.5 GHz. The average boresight gain of the antenna ranges from 3.2 to 5.41 dBi with the peak gain at 8 GHz. The simulated efficiency of the antenna is greater than 73% within the operating bandwidth. The MIMO parameters such as envelope correlation coefficient, diversity gain, and mean effective gain are evaluated and presented. The appropriateness of the proposed antenna for deployment in the shark fin housing of the present-day automobiles is verified using on-car performance estimation.

In this paper, we present the performance of multi-user transmitter pre-processing (MUTP) assisted coded-interleave division multiple access (IDMA) system over correlated frequency-selective channels for downlink communication. We realize MUTP using singular value decomposition (SVD) technique, which exploits the channel state information (CSI) of all the active users that is acquired via feedback channels. We consider the MUTP technique to alleviate the effects of co-channel interference (CCI) and multiple access interference (MAI). To be specific, we estimate the CSI using least square error (LSE) algorithm at each of the mobile stations (MSs) and perform vector quantization using Lloyd's algorithm, and feedback the bits that represents the quantized magnitudes and phases to the base station (BS) through the dedicated low rate noisy channel. Finally we recover the quantized bits at the BS to formulate the pre-processing matrix. The performance of MUTP aided IDMA systems are evaluated for five types of delay spread distributions pertaining to long-term evolution (LTE) and Stanford University Interim (SUI) channel models. We also compare the performance of MUTP with minimum mean square error (MMSE) detector for the coded IDMA system. The considered TP scheme alleviates the effects of CCI with less complex signal detection at the MSs when compared to MMSE detector. Further, our simulation results reveal that SVD-based MUTP assisted coded IDMA system outperforms the MMSE detector in terms of achievable bit error rate (BER) with low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirement by mitigating the effects of CCI and MAI.