Design, Fabrication, and Measurement of Efficient Beam-Shaping Reflectors for 5G Applications

An optimization procedure to design passive metallic reflectors for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile network applications, as well as fabrication and measurement of the designed reflectors, are presented. These reflecting surfaces can be used as passive repeaters in both indoor and outdoor applications to change field coverage by redirecting incident beams into desired directions with relatively controllable power distributions. The design procedure involves an efficient combination of a heuristic optimization method [based on genetic algorithms (GAs)] and a full-wave electromagnetic solver [based on the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA)]. The optimized geometries are realized using a 3-D printing method that enables low-cost and adaptive fabrication. During optimizations,
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compact and efficient reflectors are implemented as reference designs, and they are fabricated to have 18 GHz center frequency of operation. Measurements in a free-space setup are in good agreement with simulations, demonstrating the success of both the design procedure and the designed reflectors as potential 5G components.