A Highly Integrated Vehicle’s Headlight With a Dielectric Resonant Antenna and a 3-D Printed Beam-Scanning Lens in the Adaptive Front-Lighting System for C-V2X Applications

A concept to integrate antennas in a vehicle’s headlight for cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) applications is proposed based on the following ideas. First, due to its dielectric properties, the optical lens (OL) in a vehicle’s headlight can serve both as an electromagnetic (EM) lens antenna (LA) and a dielectric resonant antenna (DRA). The triplexing of the OL, LA, and DRA is enabled by sharing the same dielectric block. Second, the OL also functions as the DRA to achieve unidirectional radiation excited by a novel lateral differential feeding network, maintaining an unobstructed optical path by the DRA’s ground-free design. Finally, the LA and DRA radiate scanning beams alongside the OL, enabled by the adaptive front-lighting system (AFS), thereby eliminating the need for an extra EM beam-scanning mechanism. This helps to reduce the system’s complexity and cost. To verify the concept, a ground-free unidirectional DRA and a 3D-printed millimeter wave (mmWave) beam-scanning LA are integrated with the OL in a vehicle’s headlight. The DRA achieves a front-to-back ratio (FBR) of 13.73 dB, operating at 2.7 GHz with a gain of 3.26 dBi. The LA achieves the maximum gain of 16.64 dBi, operating at 26 GHz with a beam coverage of ±20°, which can be further extended by the AFS. When adjusting the headlight by the AFS, the LA and DRA maintain the optimum communication range, enhancing the vehicle’s situational awareness during interactions with other vehicles and infrastructures. This article presents a viable solution for in-vehicle antenna integration for C-V2X applications.