title: Agile intelligent antenna system for industry 4.0 and beyond
Creators: name: Jabbar, Abdul
Publisher: name: University of Glasgow
Year: 2024

description: The next-generation industrial paradigms such as Industry 4.0 and beyond require ultra-high reliability, extremely low latency, high throughput, and fine-grain spatial differentiation for wireless communication, sensing, and control systems. Traditional industrial wired networks suffer from impediments such as expensive installation and maintenance costs, wear and tear, reduced flexibility, and restricted mobility in dynamic industrial environments. Moreover, the conventional sub-6 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) wireless bands such as 2.4 and 5 GHz are not able to fully meet the requirements of high bandwidth, high data rate, and low latency for emerging industrial wireless applications.
To overcome the aforementioned challenges, the utilization of the 60 GHz millimeter-wave (mmWave) license-free ISM band, spanning from 57–71 GHz, is being considered as a potential solution for advancing next-generation industrial wireless communication and sensing applications, as well as for future technologies of beyond fifth-generation (5G) and sixth-generation (6G). This spectrum offers a large bandwidth of 14 GHz and experiences low spectral congestion. However, its effectiveness is hindered by significant path loss and high signal attenuation caused by oxygen absorption, posing additional challenges to design wideband, high-gain, compact, and cost-effective antenna solutions.
This thesis encompasses three antenna design solutions offering high-performance metrics, aimed at next-generation mmWave industrial wireless applications and 6G technologies. The first antenna design is a compact and wideband 64-element planar microstrip array based on a hybrid corporate-series network. The array has the size of 2 cm × 3.5 cm × 0.025 cm and offers -10 dB impedance bandwidth over the entire 57–71 GHz, 1 dB gain bandwidth of 13 GHz from 57–70 GHz, low side lobe levels, and above 70% radiation efficiency in the whole band of interest. The inherent phase shift across the operating frequency in the series-fed antenna elements is leveraged to achieve frequency beamscanning over a scan range of 40° with less than 1 dB scan loss.
The second antenna design is a compact, low-cost, high-gain, and planar 16-element linear array using the corporate feed technique. This design provides squintless high directional beamstowards the broadside over 7 GHz of bandwidth (57–64 GHz), and 1 dB gain -bandwidth of more than 3 GHz. This makes it a suitable candidate for industrial fixed wireless access communication scenarios that require large bandwidth and multi-gigabit data rate, such as highdefinition video signal transfer. An antenna with a broad 1 dB gain bandwidth can find various applications across different sectors. Primarily, such an antenna could be utilized in wireless communication systems where reliable and high-speed data transmission is essential. spans across mobile communication networks, enhancing signal strength and coverage for improved data throughput, and seamless connectivity for IIoT applications, enabling efficient data exchange in various settings such as critical industrial automation scenarios. Additionally, in radar systems, a broad 1 dB gain bandwidth antenna could improve target detection and tracking accuracy, enhancing situational awareness in surveillance applications. Overall, the broad frequency coverage provided by the 1 dB gain bandwidth antenna makes it versatile for a wide range of applications requiring robust and reliable wireless communication capabilities.
The third proposed antenna solution is the hallmark of this thesis. A fully programmable electronically beamsteerable dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) is designed and tested for the first time at 60 GHz band, thereby marking a significant milestone in advanced mmWave beamforming metasurface antennas. The 16-element linear DMA is based on novel digital complementary electric inductive capacitive (CELC) metamaterial elements whose radiation states can be dynamically controlled through a high-speed field programmable gate array (FPGA). The smart DMA can synthesize narrow beams, wide beams as well as multiple beams from a single aperture by generating different digital coding combinations. The proposed DMA is a low-cost and low-power smart beamforming antenna applicable to a diverse range of mmWave communication, sensing, and imaging avenues for smart wireless industries and 6G networks with agile beam-switching having a delay of less than 5 ns.
The proposed DMA boasts striking features, including compact size, meticulously designed PCB, and software control via binary coding from a high-speed FPGA. Operating within the high-frequency mmWave ISM band, it encompasses a diverse range of license-free mmWave applications. The designed DMA achieves key performance metrics, boasting a bandwidth exceeding 2.16 GHz around 60 GHz, a high gain of above 9 dBi for most beamforming codes, and a radiation efficiency surpassing 60%. Additionally, it offers a versatile beam synthesis capability, enabling the generation of narrow pencil beams, wide beams, and multiple beams from a single DMA aperture.
The proposed antenna solutions were fabricated, and tested through an in-house designed measurement setup which is elucidated in this thesis. Eventually, the striking futuristic applications of mmWave antennas, and their associated open research challenges are highlighted.