Reconfigurable Reflectarrays and Array Lenses for Dynamic Antenna Beam Control: A Review

By Sean Victor Hum, Julien Perruisseau-Carrier. IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 2013

843 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Advances in reflectarrays and array lenses with electronic beam-forming capabilities are enabling a host of new possibilities for these high-performance, low-cost antenna architectures. This paper reviews enabling technologies and topologies of reconfigurable reflectarray and array lens designs, and surveys a range of experimental implementations and achievements that have been made in this area in recent years. The paper describes the fundamental design approaches employed in realizing reconfigurable designs, and explores advanced capabilities of these nascent architectures, such as multi-band operation, polarization manipulation, frequency agility, and amplification. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing future challenges and possibilities for these antennas.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62a3a1bcb73754f7d2de3c6145e0033b61c38576

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Citations in the corpus

Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead (2020, neutral): “in [71].”
Reconfigurable Folded Reflectarray Antenna Based Upon Liquid Crystal Technology (2015, background): “A review of reconfigurable reflectarrays has been done in [16] to examine the achievements that have been made in recent years.”
Radio Localization and Mapping With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Challenges, Opportunities, and Research Directions (2019, background): “While a more in-depth overview of different technologies can be found in the literature for reflectarrays [8], transmitarrays [12], and phased arrays [13], a specific example of an RIS based on transmitarray technology is presented in Figure 3.”
Large Intelligent Surface/Antennas (LISA): Making Reflective Radios Smart (2019, background): “Alternatives include varactor diodes [40] and MEMS, where the reflector can be electronically controlled to change the resonance frequency and thus create the desired phase shift and amplitude change [41].”
A 1600-Element Dual-Frequency Electronically Reconfigurable Reflectarray at X/Ku-Band (2017, methodology): “As summarized in [2], the tunable resonator approach is used to design a reconfigurable element with relatively low loss.”
A Study of Phase Quantization Effects for Reconfigurable Reflectarray Antennas (2017, background): “Recently, reconfigurable reflectarray antennas (RRAs) have attracted growing interests because of the capability for dynamic antenna pattern control [2], [3].”
A Speculative Study on 6G (2019, background): “Smart reﬂective surfaces in [3] follow the same spirit despite focusing on relaying signals and using standard materials.”
A Broadband High-Efficiency Reconfigurable Reflectarray Antenna Using Mechanically Rotational Elements (2017, background): “in literature as summarized in [2] and [3].”
Communicating With Large Intelligent Surfaces: Fundamental Limits and Models (2019, background): “transmitarrays [9], metamirrors [10]–[12], reflectarrays [13], [14], metaprisms [15], and holograms [7], [16].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Communication (2018, background): “The RIS units operating on the incoming ﬁeld can be distributed over the meta-surface with continuity [14], [19], [20], [29] or in discrete positions [15], [22], [23], [30].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Wireless Communications: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities (2020, methodology): “Different technologies can be used to implement an RIS [5], [6].”
Energy Efficient Multi-User MISO Communication Using Low Resolution Large Intelligent Surfaces (2018, background): “Current implementations of LIS include conventional reflectarrays [9], [16], [17], liquid crystal metasurfaces [18], or even software defined metamaterials intended for nanonetworks [19].”
Using Reconfigurable Transmitarray to Achieve Beam-Steering and Polarization Manipulation Applications (2015, positive): “To address the above requirement, many artificial structured lenses have been proposed, such as transmitarray [1] and phase shifting surface [2].”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “and array lenses for dynamic antenna beam control is available in [71].”
Federated Learning for 6G: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities (2021, background): “Hence, if properly deployed, an RIS promises much lower energy consumption than traditional amplify-and-forward (AF) relays [39]–[41].”
6G Networks: Beyond Shannon Towards Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communications (2020, background): “Different antennas technologies can be adopted to design an RIS, along with reﬂect-arrays [69], transmit-arrays [70], [71] and, smart, programmable or software deﬁned metasurfaces [72] [73].”
Toward Massive MIMO 2.0: Understanding Spatial Correlation, Interference Suppression, and Pilot Contamination (2019, background): “The same concept has appeared under the names intelligent walls [69], reconfigurable reflectarrays [70], and metasurfaces [71].”