Large-Aperture Metamaterial Lens Antenna for Multi-Layer MIMO Transmission for 6G

A metamaterial lens refers to a planar structure having multiple metamaterial unit cells capable of manipulating electromagnetic waves to improve antenna gains by changing their shape, geometry, size, or orientation. In this paper, we propose a large-aperture metamaterial lens antenna (MLA) designed to improve the gain of multiple beams emitted from a linear feed antenna array, taking multi-layer transmission into account. A new channel model incorporating MLA is presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed MLA on beam gain and system throughput gain. The channel model is derived by decomposing the entire propagation channel from the transmit antenna to the receive antenna through metamaterial lens into five serial channels. The measurement results of the MLA prototype prove that the channel model is valid to reflect the actual multiple beam patterns. Simulation results based on the channel model show that a single large-aperture MLA can achieve beam gain of up to 14 dB compared to the case without a lens. Finally, by adopting the proposed large-aperture MLA, it is shown through system-level simulation that the throughput of user equipment is increased on cellular networks.