A wideband polarization reconfigurable antenna for WLAN applications

This paper proposes a wideband polarization reconfigurable antenna design for WLAN applications. It consists of a shorted annular patch (SAP) antenna as the source, a partially reflective surface (PRS) structure to enhance the gain, and a reconfigurable Wilkinson power divider as the feed network. The antenna can electronically alter its polarization between linear polarization (LP), left-hand circular polarization (LHCP), and right-hand circular polarization (RHCP),achieving an overlapped 10dB impedance bandwidth and 3 dB axial-ratio bandwidth of 4.68-5.33 GHz (13%), thus outperforming most of the reported polarization reconfigurable antennas in terms of the frequency bandwidth.