An Efficient Approach for Reducing the Complexity of Reconfigurable Antennas

This paper proposes a new method of characterizing reconfigurable antennas for reducing its complexity while still maintaining its reconfigurability. The proposed method is performed by removing the less important switches of a conventional reconfigurable antenna. Therefore, the proposed antenna only has the switches that play important roles in the reconfigurability. The importance of each switch is evaluated by the correlation coefficient of the two envelopes of frequency responses of the antenna. During the evaluating process, the switch to be determined is turned on and off, respectively; whereas, the other switches are in ON and OFF states randomly to provide sufficient number of antenna configurations. To verify the concept of this approach, a frequency configurable antenna is designed and simulated. After reducing the switch number of the antenna from 40 to 8, the final structure still has an evenly-distributed reconfigurable coverage of reflection coefficients which are less than -20 dB within the band of 1.7 GHz ~ 2.7 GHz.