Reconfigurable antennas and their practical applications—A review

This paper presents the review on the design of various reconfigurable antennas and their applications in the current scenario. There are more challenges involved in the design of these antennas. This paper also describes the various methods used for reconfiguring the frequency bands. The single parameter reconfiguration and hybrid reconfiguration examples are analyzed with their performances. The parameters such as gain, efficiency, and size of the existing antenna is compared. The various switches deployed in the antenna for achieving the reconfiguration are presented in this paper. The switches such as pin diodes, varactor diodes, MEMS, and mechanical switching are also elaborated with their corresponding merits and demerits. The diodes are switched on and off to activate and deactivate the structure of the antenna. Similarly, mechanical actuators are used for mechanical switching mechanism. The polarization reconfiguration mechanism between linear and circular; pattern reconfiguration mechanism between directional and omnidirectional are reviewed with various examples. In addition to that, several designs of reconfigurable filtering antennas, MIMO antennas are also reviewed in detail.