Design and optimization of next generation mobile smart antenna

A smart antenna is a co-planar broadband antenna which is made from an electrical platform-utilized on both sides. Double-sided printed circuit board used in the design of this type of smart antennas makes it cost effective at the microwave level of frequencies exceeding 1GHz. This type of antennas is used for broadband frequencies, especially ultra-wideband as their manufacturing is easy for which PCB production is used. In this research, a new Model Vivaldi UWB is designed, fabricated and measured. After the successful implementation of single unit Vivaldi antenna, an 8x8 array of the same shape UWB antenna is designed, fabricated and measured in the laboratory conditions. Return-loss, VSWR, radiation pattern, and gain of the single-unit-antenna, as well as the 8x8 array, are measured and compared with the simulated results obtained through HFSS software. The compared results of the single unit antenna and array antenna show reasonable agreement. The designed antenna has a large bandwidth and high gain and it is very useful for the next generation mobile communications and MIMO applications. This is due to its fast speed, increased capacity, and its ability to eliminate the harmful effects of fading and signal multipath while attempting to obtain high data throughput deploying limited bandwidth transmission channels.