A 38° Wide Beam-Steerable Compact and Highly Efficient V-band Leaky Wave Antenna with Surface Integrated Waveguide for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication
Pallav Kumar Sah, Ifana Mahbub
Abstract
This paper presents a highly efficient single-layer substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) based leaky-wave antenna (LWA) for the millimeter-wave unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system. The leaky wave-based radiating part of the unit cell includes a combination of two Y-shaped slots with 46° stretched V etched on the top SIW, resulting in a W-shaped structure. The proposed array achieves a high gain of 13.47 dBi for the frequency range of 56.3 GHz to 63.4 GHz covering the unlicensed band, with a fine matching level below -21 dB. Using the leaky wave antenna's frequency scanning capability, the proposed antenna exhibits a scanning range of 38°. The designed antenna shows a promising solution for the UAV-to-UAV applications due to its low profile and compactness and is well-suited for the single-layer low-cost printed circuit board fabrication process using Rogers RT 5880 as substrate. The radiation pattern for the achieved bandwidth shows an average half-power angular beamwidth of 12.1°, resulting in a radiation efficiency of more than 62% for the elements arranged uniformly at a distance of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{0.456}\lambda$</tex> . Following an overall low-profile compact size of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$6.48\times 4\ \lambda$</tex> corresponding to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$3.24\times 0.2\ \text{cm}$</tex> and improved performance, the antenna achieves an elliptical polarization at 60 GHz for an axial ratio equal to 3.5 dBi.