Design of a Compact 24 GHz Antenna Array for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Communication

This paper presents the design of a compact 4 × 4 antenna array suitable for unmanned aerial vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication applications. The proposed antenna array can offer a narrow beamwidth, high gain, wide beam steering capability and is highly compact. The substrate material used is Rogers 5880 with a thickness of 0.2 mm, and copper is used for the patch and ground material with 0.14 mm thickness. The di-electric constant and the tangent loss of the Rogers substrate are 2.2 and 0.0004, respectively. 45° phase shifters are incorporated in the feeding paths to facilitate the beamsteering. The dimensions of the proposed antenna array are 32 × 32 × 0.48 mm
³
. The designed antenna array has the resonating frequency at 24 GHz and has a bandwidth of 0.83 GHz (3.5% fractional bandwidth). The measured far field gain of the designed antenna array is 16.7 dBi. The beamwidth derived from the array’s far-field radiation pattern is 14.6°, and the maximum beam steering range of the array is 102° along the θ axis.