A Novel Compact Reflectarray Antenna Unit-Cell Operating at 5 GHz

In this paper, a novel and compact reflectarray unit-cell operating at 5 GHz is proposed. The unit-cell is a combination of printed microstrip patches and dielectric resonator antenna. The size of the unit-cell is about 0.3λ×0.3λ at the center frequency. Full-wave simulation of the unit-cell results in linear and extended phase curves. In addition, we designed an array including 26×26 elements of this kind of unit-cell. The final structure is simulated with CST MWS software and maximum gain of 6.3 dB (5GHz) is obtained. Furthermore, the bandwidth of 1-dB and 3-dB changes in gain is equal to 32% and 40%, respectively. It should be noted that a different unit-cell arrangement is used and cross polarization level is reduced as a result. The efficiency of simulated structure is 67.6% at 5 GHz.