Mantle cloaking for co-site radio-frequency antennas

Abstract

We show that properly designed mantle cloaks, consisting of patterned metallic sheets placed around cylindrical monopoles, allow tightly packing the same antennas together in a highly dense telecommunication platform. Our experimental demonstration is applied to the relevant example of two cylindrical monopole radiators operating for 3G and 4G mobile communications. The two antennas are placed in close proximity, separated by 1/10 of the shorter operational wavelength, and, after cloaking, are shown to remarkably operate as if isolated in free-space. This result paves the way to unprecedented co-siting strategies for multiple antennas handling different services and installed in overcrowded platforms, such as communication towers, satellite payloads, aircrafts, or ship trees. More broadly, this work presents a significant application of cloaking technology to improve the efficiency of modern communication systems

Design of cloaked Yagi-Uda antennas

“…The design procedure presented in this work can be applied to any frequency range of interest and considered as a nontrivial generalization of our previous results on the cloaking of finite-length metallic cylinders [11,13] and dipole antennas [14,19]. Compared to these earlier results, in fact, the presence of two or more parasitic elements acting as loads of the driven dipole introduces significant complications in the achievement of a final working design.…”

“…Among the various cloaking techniques proposed so far, mantle cloaking [5,6] is particularly promising for antenna applications at microwave frequencies, due to its straightforward implementation [11] and the availability of accurate analytical models [12,13] resulting in quick and effective design procedures. Moreover, as it happens in any scattering cancellation based approach to cloaking, the concealed object is not electromagnetically isolated and, thus, the mantle cloaking can be successfully applied to different antenna scenarios, with remarkable advantages for both transmitting [14][15][16][17][18][19] and receiving [20] antennas.…”

Active Microwave Cloaking Using Parity-Time-Symmetric Satellites

“…This process, known in the scientific literature as cloaking [1]- [10], is not only of fundamental significance from the basic research standpoint, but it can also enable new applications in different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, including microwaves and optics, and even in other physical domains, namely, acoustics, mechanics and thermo-dynamics. In the microwave regime, which is the main focus of this paper, potential applications include reducing the interference between multiantenna radio systems as in next-generation massive multi-input multi-output wireless communication systems [11]- [13], advancement of stealth technology in radar systems to suppress the shadow of hidden objects [14]- [15], and improving the efficiency of radiofrequency energy harvesting by eliminating the loss due to scattering [16]- [18]. Research in this area has seen different breakthroughs since the advent of metamaterials and numerous approaches to cloaking have been explored, including transformation optics [1]- [2], carpet cloaking [3], mantle cloaking [4]- [5], plasmonic cloaking [6]- [7], and a few others [8]- [10].…”

Scattering Fields Control by Metamaterial Device Based on Ultra-Broadband Polarization Converters

“…In recent years, great efforts have been dedicated to the metamaterial focusing in microwave, terahertz and optical frequencies, which inspired many applications such as acoustic cloaks [1][2][3], gradient index lenses, hyperlenses, perfect absorbers, polarization rotators, and many other devices [4][5][6][7][8][9]. As focusing points, near and far scattering electromagnetic fields were controlled by metamaterial.…”