A new approach in beam steering for WLAN applications

This study presents a new parasitic element placement technique to control radiation pattern of an printed antenna used for WLAN 802.11 n/ac applications and operated between 5180 and 5800 MHz. Many indoor communication devices might need steerable antennas in order to obtain better throughput performance and also improve interference avoidance with other communication links. By taking into account that the dimensions of most industrial devices, most of the legacy phased array methods could not be implemented easily since they require more space and complexity to control beam. However, proposed method can be implemented into a very small area in the circuit boards which need beam steering for communication applications. Earlier phase of this study was done with planar inverted-F antenna but its default radiation pattern was adversely affected by parasitic elements because of including a shorting arm to the ground. Then, printed L shaped monopole antenna was designed, optimized for beam steering and further investigations were performed with this type of antenna. At the end of the study, it is provided that the radiation pattern of L shaped monopole can be controlled with four parasitic elements placed in the proximity of the main radiator.