Design of a GSM, DCS and UMTS adaptive beam steering base station antenna

The goal of this paper is to present a beam steering multi-band base station antenna for mobile communications without RF components (phase shifters, amplifiers, ...) or Butler matrix. This base station antenna associates a omni-directional antenna to a cylindrical controllable metallic Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) material. The main characteristic of this lattice is to include PIN diodes along the metallic wires in order to control the conductivity of each wire and so the angular sectors where the cylindrical EBG structure is transparent. After a presentation of the controllable EBG material and the beam steering principle, we will present the passive antenna that have validate the principle and the simulated EM performances before the active one with 1080 diodes and we will show the EM performances of this kind of structure. A part of the works presented here have been made under the RNRT “BIP” project [1].