Performance Improvement of Antenna Using Metasurface: An Overview

Abstract

This paper presents an in-depth review of the performance improvement of antennas using metasurface. Metasurface is a periodic arrangement of perfect electric conductors (PECs) on a metalbacked dielectric substrate that do not exist in nature and are able to manipulate the behavior of electromagnetic (EM) waves incident on it. The manipulations of EM waves improve the performances in terms of impedance bandwidth, gain, size, specific absorption rate (SAR), radar-cross-section (RCS), and polarization conversions. Consequently, numerous recent works on metasurface-inspired antenna design and their theoretical perspectives on performance enhancements are discussed. By adopting the discussed theories, novel metasurfaces are developed and proposed that analyze impedance-bandwidth enhancement, gain enhancement, and SAR reduction. For designing the metasurfaces, initially a conventional rectangular unit cell (CRUC) is theoretically developed using transmission line model at 2.45 GHz. Following that, the CRUC-based metasurface is incorporated with a monopole antenna, which enhanced the impedance-bandwidth from 140 MHz to 320 MHz and the gain from 2.5 dB to 7.4 dB. On the body, the presence of the metasurface retains all the performances as free space, with a reduced 1 g SAR of 0.034 and 10 g SAR of 0.024 W/kg.