Broadband wireless technology that enables a variety of gigabit-per-second class data services is a requirement in future wireless communication systems. Broadband wireless channels become extremely frequency-selective and cause severe inter-symbol interference (ISI). Furthermore, the average received signal power changes in a random manner because of the shadowing and distance-dependant path losses resulted from the movement of a mobile terminal (MT). Accordingly, the transmission performance severely degrades. To overcome the performance degradation, two most promising approaches are the frequency-domain equalization (FDE) and distributed antenna network (DAN). The former takes advantage of channel frequency-selectivity to obtain the frequency-diversity gain. In DAN, a group of distributed antennas serve each user to mitigate the negative impact of shadowing and path losses. This article will introduce the recent advances in FDE and DAN for the broadband single-carrier (SC) transmissions.

A stacked rectangular microstrip antenna with a shorting plate and a helical pin is proposed as a car antenna for triple band operation in ITS. The proposed antenna operates as a conventional stacked microstrip antenna at the highest frequency band. At the middle and the lowest frequency bands, the antenna radiates at low elevation angles from the helical pin and the shorting plate. In this paper, as an example of triple band antennas in the ITS, an antenna is designed that supports PHS, VICS and ETC. The proposed antennas have the proper radiation pattern for each application and are small in size.

A planar inverted-E (PIE) antenna that can achieve a wide impedance bandwidth is proposed. The antenna is realized by inserting a branch capacitance between the feed line and the shorting pin of a conventional planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA). Such a modification significantly enhanced the impedance bandwidth while maintaining the antenna size. The proposed antenna possesses a very wide impedance bandwidth of 1250 MHz (1650-2900 MHz) at a voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) <3. In addition, good radiation patterns were obtained at the desired frequency bands.

In this paper, we investigate a multi-packet transmitting and receiving wireless mesh network that uses a multi-antenna set on each node in the network. In wireless mesh networks for accessing the Internet, the target of all traffic generated from distributed nodes is a gateway (GW). Therefore, many packets are concentrated around the GW and the communication channel around the GW is crowded. To prevent packet congestion around the GW, we propose setting an adaptive array antenna on the GW and the relay nodes. We also calculate an appropriate number of antenna elements considering the fair traffic over the whole region, to prevent packet congestion at each node.

A spiral array radial line slot antenna (SA-RLSA) is designed in 22 GHz band. A SA-RLSA excited with a coaxial feeder suffers from aperture illumination fluctuation in amplitude and phase in the circumferential (φ-) direction while in the radial direction, reasonably uniform distribution is observed. Rotational symmetry of radiation patterns is degraded and especially the sidelobe levels are unbalanced. This fluctuation is associated with the generation of the higher order modes in the φ-direction and is the unique defect of SA-RLSA which uses oversized waveguide. In this paper, a novel feeding structure with two pairs of parasitic pins around a coaxial feeder is proposed and designed so as to compensate the rotational asymmetry of aperture illumination. A measurement using the model antenna designed in 22 GHz band demonstrates the enhancement of the rotational symmetry; the circumferential fluctuation is reduced from 5.1 dB and 33 degrees to 1.8 dB and 12 degrees, while the fluctuation in the first sidelobe level suppressed from 10.7 dB to 1.2 dB.

Broadband antennas have various applications in digital terrestrial television (DTV) services. Compact broadband antennas are required for arranging in long and narrow space along the rim of a laptop display. A leaky-wave antenna using the composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH-TL) is one of the candidates for achieving the broadband antenna. However, there are not enough to design guideline of small leaky wave antennas using the CRLH-TL for UHF band. In this paper, a CRLH-TL comprising a ladder network is proposed for broadband and simple structure. The paper also discusses the design of a leaky-wave antenna with the CRLH-TL operating in the DTV band. The relation between the operating bandwidth and attenuation constant of the CRLH-TL is discussed. An antenna that can be accommodated in the limited and narrow space available in mobile terminals has to be designed. Hence, the effects of the number of cells and a finite ground plane are discussed with the purpose of achieving the miniaturization of the antenna. In this study, the transmission and radiation characteristics of the fabricated antennas are measured. The gain of the fabricated antenna is confirmed to remain almost constant even when the operating frequency is varied. The maximum gain and operating band achieved in this study are approximately -0.6 dBi and about 54%, respectively.

This paper presents a newly developed small-sized shaped beam base station antenna in order to reduce inter-sector interference for next generation high speed wireless data communication systems. The developed antenna realizes polarization diversity as a single small-sized antenna without decreasing the 3 dB main beamwidth compared with the conventional antenna by applying a newly designed beam shaping method. Furthermore, side sub-reflectors are newly installed in the radome to reduce the antenna beam gain in the direction toward the edge region neighboring the other sectors of the horizontal antenna pattern. By adopting this type of reflector, the diameter of the radome can be minimized at 0.65 λ, which is slightly longer than that of the conventional antenna. Both a computer simulation and a field measurement test based on an actual cellular network were conducted for the purpose of clarifying the validity of the shaped beam antenna. In the results, the CINR at the service area by the shaped beam antenna was 1 dB and 3.5 dB better than that of the conventional antenna at the median and 10% of CDF, respectively. The developed antenna will be expected to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of cellular radio systems in the future.

The use of directional antenna and polarization diversity techniques has been reported to achieve good MIMO performance. Low-profile, small structures are required to configure the MIMO antenna with these techniques. First, we assume downlink transmission in indoor MIMO systems and present the design guidelines for the radiation pattern to obtain large channel capacity by the ray-tracing method. We then propose a uni-directional, dual-polarized MIMO antenna with a thickness of 0.24λ based on the design guidelines. The proposed antenna consists of dipole antennas mounted horizontally to the ground plane and cavity backed slot antennas for vertical polarization. We apply the proposed antenna to 2 2 MIMO transmission and demonstrate the effectiveness of channel capacity enhancement in an actual environment. The improvement factor is revealed to be +16.2% with place averaged value compared to sleeve antenna configuration.

A waveform of an ultra wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) system can be extremely distorted through a channel even for free-space transmission because of antenna dispersion. This highly degrades the link budget performance. Therefore, the understand of antenna characteristics, which effects on waveform distortion, is necessary. This paper studies the waveform distortion due to antenna in free space transmission in UWB-IR system. The link budget is usually evaluated by using the Friis' transmission formula. However, it is not directly applicable to the UWB-IR transmission system. The link budget evaluation formula attended from conventional Friis' transmission formula that takes into account the transmitted waveform, its distortion due to the antennas, the channel and the correlation receiver is proposed. Since the antenna is significant pulse-shaping filters in UWB-IR system, the example kind of the log-periodic dipole antenna (LPDA) is experimentally examined, especially focused on the effect of the template waveforms.

A one-input four-way power divider is developed for feeding circuit of a microstrip comb-line antenna. The four-way power divider is composed of two-stage tournament-configuration of three Y-junctions. To control the sidelobe level and beam width in radiation pattern of the array, the power dividing ratio is assigned for the four-way power divider. Required dividing ratio is designed by changing the line width to control the impedance. To take impedance matching at the connection parts of the Y-junctions, 1/4-wavelength impedance-transformers are applied to the divider and taper structure is supplied at discontinuities. Four-comb-line antennas are designed and fabricated at 76.5 GHz. We evaluated sidelobe level and beam width by experiment to confirm the performance of the power divider.

This letter considers power-controlled transmission from directional antennas in mmWave wireless personal area network (WPAN) systems. The attributes of these systems are studied; these include the number of concurrent transmissions and the power consumption with different system parameters, such as the antenna's beamwidth and radiating efficiency. Numerical results are presented to show that the power controlled transmission enables more concurrent transmissions than the non-power controlled transmission. The results also show that the number of concurrent transmissions increases as the beamwidth and the path loss component become smaller and the antenna's radiating efficiency increases. In addition, the power controlled system generally uses less power than the non-power controlled transmission set up; the overall analysis is verified by simulation.

A dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) is located below a radiating patch of an planar inverted F antenna (PIFA) to achieve a compact hybrid antenna and a multiple band operation. Loop-type structures with PIFA shorting pins are used as feeds for both the DRA and the PIFA. The proposed antenna operates well in two frequency bands without perturbing the fundamental radiation characteristics of each operating radiation mode of the DRA and the PIFA. Its electromagnetic performance and the desirable practical size of the proposed hybrid antenna are attractive for small mobile communication devices.

A new linearly tapered slot antenna (LTSA) with defected sides is proposed in this letter. Both sides are defected with half-dumbbell shape slots that may alter the surface current intensities on both sides. As the half-dumbbell size is increased, the 3-dB beamwidth of the proposed antenna is 4° and 6° lower in the E/H-plane, respectively, than these of the LTSA without defects. Accordingly, the measured gain is improved by up to 3.75 dB and the first side lobe level is lowered by about -10.8 dB and -5.8 dB in the E/H-planes, respectively.

This paper proposes a channel capacity maximization method for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas with parasitic elements. Reactive terminations are connected to the parasitic elements, and the reactance values are determined to achieve stochastically high channel capacity for the environment targeted. This method treats the S-parameter and propagation channel of the antenna, including the parasitic elements, as a combined circuit. The idea of the 'parasitic channel,' which is observed at the parasitic antenna, is introduced to simplify the optimization procedure. This method can significantly reduce the number of necessary measurements of the channel for designing the antenna. As a design example, a bidirectional Yagi-Uda array, which has two driven antennas at both ends of the linear array, is measured in an indoor environment. The resulting design offers enhanced channel capacity mainly due to its improved signal-to-noise ratio compared to the antenna without the parasitic antennas.

The hybrid antenna consisted of cylindrical dielectric resonator and rectangular slot was implemented. The hybrid antenna resonated at two different frequencies. The lower resonant frequency was associated with the rectangular slot while the higher resonant frequency was associated with the cylindrical dielectric resonator. Parametric investigation was carried out using simulation software. The proposed hybrid antenna had good agreement between the simulation and measurement results. A 24% bandwidth (return loss < 10 dB) of 2.30 GHz, and a 18% bandwidth (return loss < 10 dB) of 5.46 GHz was implemented successfully for application in ISM and UNII band.

A new scheme to avoid null zone for HF-band RFID without expanding antenna size is proposed. At first, we demonstrate by FDTD simulation that the null zone occurs because of cancellation of magnetic fields over the loop surface. To prevent cancellation of magnetic fields, the loop antenna is split into four parts, which work as a planar array antenna. The outputs of antennas are gathered by using combining circuit. We have validated by FDTD simulation that the proposed scheme enlarges the worst received power by 13.1 dB.

This paper describes a spatial fading emulator based on Clarke's model that can evaluate spatial correlation characteristics between signals received by handset antennas including human-body effect under emulated multipath propagation environments. The proposed model is composed of scatterers, phase-shifters and attenuators. The scatterers are located at equal intervals on the circumference of a circle. Phase shifters and attenuators in a control circuit are used to control the phase and amplitude of each wave radiated from the scatterers in order to emulate multi-path propagation environments, such as Rayleigh or Nakagami-Rice distribution, to be generated at their center. In this paper, the maximum distance between receiving antennas that could be used to evaluate spatial correlation characteristics between antennas was investigated experimentally. The measurement results show that 15 scatterers with a radius of 1.5 m are sufficient to evaluate spatial correlation characteristics within the branch separation of 1.7 λ when parallel dipole antennas are used as receiving antennas.

We developed a slotted waveguide planer array antenna with partially parallel feeding in millimeter-wave band. Travelling-wave excitation is more effective for low loss feeding of array antennas than parallel feeding systems. However, array antenna with travelling-wave excitation essentially possesses a significant problem of long line effect which degrades gain due to beam shift by frequency change when the array antenna is fed from the edge of the radiating waveguide. We propose the way to reduce the gain degradation due to frequency change, thus, partially parallel feeding system is developed. Measured performance of the developed antenna is evaluated in this paper.

In this letter, a new design of a metamaterial-based microstrip antenna is presented using triangular slots embedded on the ground plane to enhance the impedance bandwidth. To improve the impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna, two resonant mode frequencies are closely allocated using the slotted ground without changing the radiator element. The impedance bandwidth of VSWR < 2.5 is measured at 2.43 GHz (37.6%) centered on 6.46 GHz, from 5.24 GHz to 7.67 GHz in good agreements with the simulated results.

In this paper, joint water filling and maximal ratio transmission (joint WF-MRT) downlink transmit diversity for a single-carrier distributed antenna network (SC DAN) is proposed. The joint WF-MRT transmit weight allocates the transmit power in both transmit antenna dimension and frequency dimension, i.e., the power allocation is done both across frequencies based on WF theorem and across transmit antennas based on MRT strategy. The cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the channel capacity achievable by joint WF-MRT transmit diversity is evaluated by Monte-Carlo numerical computation method. The channel capacities achievable with joint WF-MRT, MRT, and WF transmit weight (WF transmit weight is done across transmit antennas and frequencies based on WF theorem) are compared. It is shown that the joint WF-MRT transmit weight provides the highest channel capacity among three transmit weights.