Multidisciplinary adaptive wireless communication systems: Reconfigurable MEMS integrated antennas & Coding/Decoding Structures

Wireless communication systems with reconfigurability capabilities that can dynamically adapt themselves to constantly changing environmental propagation characteristics will be key for the next generation communication scenarios. A communication system capable of changing its output dynamically through reconfigurability features allows maintaining optimal system level performances at all times regardless of changing characteristics of the communication environment. Achieving such systems, of course, makes necessary to follow a system level multidisciplinary research philosophy. For reconfigurable wireless communications systems, in particular, interrelationships of electromagnetic theory, micro systems, and information theory are vital to fully exploit the potential of these fields, which are fundamentally overlapped in mother nature. A multidisciplinary research effort focusing on indoor communication systems, motivated by the fact that the solutions to next-generation communications systems lie in a multidisciplinary research approach formed by electromagnetics, micro systems, and information theory, has been presented in this research. To this end, we first study the interrelationships between a given coding/decoding structure and multiple antenna elements used to transmit signal in multipath propagation environment. We have considered different antenna structures such as omnidirectional antennas, patches and dipoles in conjunction with different space time block codes [1], [2]. For maintaining the best system level performances at all times, the antenna elements and associated coding/decoding design must be reconfigured dynamically. We provide a novel solution for antenna reconfigurability by making use of a printed circuit board (PCB) compatible radio-frequency microelectromechanical system (RF MEMS) technology developed by the author’s group [3]. This technology allows monolithic fabrication of MEMS and antenna elements on a PCB substrate with desired electrical features for the intended application. Figure 1. illustrates the schematic of the adaptive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems employing reconfigurable antennas and coding/decoding designs. We will present both experimental and theoretical results for this system.