Design of Cost-Effective Beam Steered Phased Array Antenna with Enhanced Gain using Metamaterial Lens

In this work, a cost-effective beam steered phased array antenna with the help of switched phase shifter with enhanced gain parameter, operating at 2.5 GHz frequency, has been designed and analyzed. The proposed Beam steered phased array antenna is printed on the FR4-Epoxy dielectric substrate with a dielectric constant of 4.4 with a dimension of 13.148 × 7.36 cm. A gain of 4.922 dB without Metamaterial lens structure has been achieved by this beam steered phased array antenna and the direction of the main beam can be switched between the ± 28° angles. The Gain of this antenna has been enhanced to 7.4660 dB by pacing a metamaterial lens structure at a height of 3.2 mm above the radiating patch. A parametric analysis of the distance between the patches and the Metamaterial lens is carried out to analyze the effect of gain and return loss value (S11). All design and simulations have been carried out using the Ansoft HFSS tool. The proposed antenna can be used in 5G wireless communication in the range of ISM band, where both compact and beam-steering operation is required.