Millimeter Wave Multi-Beam-Switching Antenna

The paper introduces a high gain end-fire printed antenna operating at 14 GHz with a bandwidth of 2 GHz. The 3x3 antenna sub-array formed of this element is used to present its beam steering and multi-beam-switching capabilities for millimeter wave Massive MIMO antenna arrays of 5G networks. The co-existence of these two techniques in a Massive MIMO sub-array, aided by the use of a simple two vector excitation matrix technique, is shown in this paper. The high gain and small form factor of the antenna is useful in applications, like 5G arrays, where space is premium and the inherent layered structure also aids to the better cooling of the antenna front end. Keywords— Multibeam Antenna; Beam switching; Beam steering; High gain; Massive MIMO; mmWave (millimeter wave); 5G;