Tutorial 2: Reconfigurable antennas

Reconfigurable antennas are becoming more and more popular, a direct result of the important developments in the Telecom industry in general and the Wireless Communications domain in special. The apparition of multiservice radios and, at a higher degree, cognitive radios has considerably changed the way engineers deal with antennas. Previously, most of system engineers excluded the antenna from the evaluation of system performances; a best example is the evaluation of the system noise figure. Now, the antenna is becoming an important part of the system as it contributes to the signal processing by introducing both frequency and spatial filtering and also diversity. Some specialists talk today about Signal Processing Antennas. In the present tutorial, the speaker will talk about the different approaches to design reconfigurable antennas and will use his experience in the field to give guidelines to decide which one to use for a specific application. For each approach, antenna examples will be given and the speaker will highlight the contribution of the antenna to the system performances.