Wideband Millimeter-Wave Dielectric Resonator Antenna with Beam Steering Capability for Vehicle Applications

This paper proposes a wideband millimeter-wave (mm-wave) dielectric resonator (DR) antenna (DRA) capable of beam steering for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. An individual DRA element is firstly designed by utilizing air holes to enable the good matching of multiple modes for wideband operation. It covers the whole mm-wave frequency range from 24 to 40 GHz. Based on the element design, a wideband 1×4 DRA array with beam steering capability is developed. To overcome fabrication and assembly constraints, the four DR elements are interconnected by dielectric arms with an element spacing of 0.48$\lambda _{0}$. metal grooves and holes are combined for ensuring the beam steering capability over the entire frequency region. The designed DRA array shows an impedance bandwidth of >50%, and exhibits maximum beam steerable angles of $\pm$ 56$^{\circ }$. Experimental verification is performed by using a 1-to-4 power divider as the feeding network. Experimental results show reasonable agreement with the simulated ones. The proposed wideband DRA holds promise for 5G mm-wave communications in vehicle platforms, offering wide frequency coverage and effective beam steering capabilities simultaneously.