Design and Prototyping of Beam Steerable Antenna Array for V2X Applications

In the last years, patch antennas gained popularity in wireless applications thanks to its low size, low weight and low cost, characteristics which makes them very attractive also for automotive applications. Vehicular networks, nowadays, receive great attention and different technologies have been studied to allow V2X communications, i.e., Vehicle-to-Vehicle, Vehicle-to-Infrastructure and Vehicle-to-Pedestrian. The main goals of these communications are road safety and traffic efficiency. In particular, for direct vehicular transmissions, a 75 MHz of band has been allocated in the vicinity of 5.9 GHz. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a possible solution for the design of an array of patch antennas suitable for vehicular applications. The proposed antenna array consists of a 4x4 configuration composed by a 4-element corporate-fed array in which each radiating element is made up of a 4-element series-fed array. Furthermore, the switched line approach is used to tilt the radiation pattern of 10°, 20° and 30°. In this way, by reaching the desired beam direction, it is demonstrated that this structure can be used for real-time beam steering applications. The design and simulations are accomplished using CST Microwave Studio, moreover, physical prototypes are made to verify the feasibility of the antenna. The proposed solution shows satisfactory performances and good agreement between simulated and measured results can be observed.