High gain dielectric resonance antenna array for millimeter wave vehicular wireless communication

This paper presents a high gain dielectric resonance antenna (DRA) array for vehicular wireless communication and 5G system in millimeter wave band, which takes the advantage of low side lobe level (SLL). The planar antenna array is composed of 8 × 8 rectangular DRA elements, whose operation mode is the fundamental mode TE111 . The beamforming weights of the array are designed based on the principle of Dolph-Chebyshev distribution to suppress the antenna SLL. The planar array consists of 8 linear sub-arrays, which are fed with standing-wave series resonance method respectively. The excitations of sub-array elements are precisely adjusted based on the aperture coupling model. Furthermore, the series-parallel hybrid feed network and parallel-cascaded feed network are applied to unequally feed the sub-arrays in accordance with Chebyshev polynomials. The measurement results of prototype validate the design solution of antenna array. The impedance bandwidth is 570 MHz (25.77 GHz–26.34 GHz) for reflection coefficients less than −10 dB, and the antenna gain and SLL are 20.5 ± 1 dBi and 20 dB, respectively. Due to the advantages of miniaturization and narrow beam, the proposed DRA antenna array is adequate for vehicle communication equipment. © 2021, Electromagnetics Academy. All rights reserved.