Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
5, MAY 2015
1587
I. I NTRODUCTION
Manuscript received May 29, 2015; revised January 03, 2016; accepted
January 22, 2016. Date of publication March 08, 2016; date of current version May 03, 2016. This work was supported by AGFA Healthcare, Mortsel,
Belgium.
P. J. Soh is with the Advanced Communication Engineering (ACE) CoE,
School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Universiti Malaysia
Perlis (UniMAP), Perlis 02600, Malaysia (e-mail: pjsoh@ieee.org).
S. Yan, H. Xu, and G. A. E. Vandenbosch are with the ESATTELEMIC Research Division, Department of Electrical Engineering,
KU Leuven, Leuven 3001, Belgium (e-mail: sen.yan@esat.kuleuven.be;
xulxht@gmail.com; guy.vandenbosch@esat.kuleuven.br).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2016.2539374
0018-926X 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1588
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 64, NO. 5, MAY 2015
the near-field mutual coupling to other metal parts. The proposed WICAV antenna is implemented by standard multilayer
printed-circuit board (PCB) technology, and the final size of the
antenna is 51.5 40 3.6 mm3 .
To our best knowledge, this is the first reported open
cavity antenna with such topology. The performance of the
proposed antenna is evaluated via simulations and measurements in FS and while mounted into the two larger metallic
enclosures, i.e., panel and bucky. Besides, a comprehensive signal transmission/reception evaluation using two different types
of WLAN modules mounted into the panelbucky structure
is performed in a realistic indoor environment, with the aim
of benchmarking against the antenna provided by the WLAN
modules manufacturer.
II. A NTENNA T OPOLOGY
The size of the WICAV antenna is related with its operating wavelength. In this design, dielectric loading is used to
miniaturize the cavity, which is realized by a multilayered
substrate-integrated waveguide (SIW) technology [9], [10]. The
dual-band operation is obtained by designing the different
modes of the cavity. The basic mode of the cavity (TM110 ) is
designed around 2.4 GHz. A rectangularly shaped open loop
resonator is introduced to enhance the bandwidth in the lower
frequency band. The combination of cavity antennas and openloop resonators or split ring resonators (SRRs) has proven to
be able to remarkably decrease the resonant frequency and
improve the impedance matching [11], [12]. The higher order
modes (TM310 and TM130 ) of the cavity are located between
5 and 6 GHz. A pair of vias is introduced to tune the resonant
frequencies of the higher order modes and obtain a good matching [9], [10]. The stripline is used to feed the cavity in order to
reduce the coupling with other devices.
The topology of the WICAV antenna is depicted in Fig. 1. It
contains two layers of Rogers RO4003C (thickness 1.524 mm,
permittivity 3.38, and loss tangent 0.0021) that are bonded by
a layer of IS400 high-performance prepreg (0.46 mm thick,
permittivity 3.9, and loss tangent 0.022). The cavity resonator,
sized at 23 48.5 mm2 , is embedded within the substrate area
using 0.45-mm-diameter vias used to form its metallic walls.
One of the 48.5-mm sides is left open in order to function as
a radiating slot. The rectangularly shaped open-loop resonator
sized at 18 18.5 mm2 is integrated into this cavity. The cavity structure is fed by a 50- stripline, which in turn is fed by
a coaxial feed. Vias sized at 0.45 mm in diameter are implemented on both sides of this line at about /4 (calculated using
the guided wavelength at 2.45 GHz) in order to avoid parallel
plate modes. Vias are spaced 1.5 mm throughout the complete
design. In order to test the antenna, probe feeding is used from
the reverse side to the 50- stripline located on the intermediate
prepreg layer. The thickness of the cavity is 3 mm. It is totally
implemented using standard PCB technology.
III. O PERATING E NVIRONMENT
The antenna is to be placed directly inside a fully covered
metallic enclosure sized at 375 450 7.5 mm3 , except for
a 70 7.5 mm2 radiating slot, which is then fully covered by
Fig. 1. WICAV antenna. (a) Cross section of the layer structure, (b) antenna
dimensions (in mm), and (c) fabricated antenna prototype.
a 1-mm-thick ABS plastic cover for water/dust-proofing purposes. This enclosure (named metallic enclosure 1, or ME1) is
intended to be placed into a larger metallic enclosure (ME2)
sized at 570 570 75 mm3 for WLAN operation in an
indoor environment. To enable the placement of ME1 into ME2,
one of its sides is left open during operation. Two types of ME2
have been investigated, a fully covered version (ME2A) and
another with a rectangular opening at its top (ME2B). These
enclosures are shown in Figs. 2 and 3.
To mitigate the possibility of the antenna embedded inside
ME1 ending up at the closed edge of ME2, two antennas are
placed inside ME1 (see Fig. 2) and labeled as slot 1 and slot 2,
respectively.
Right from the start, a simplified model for the buckypanel
structure was used when the antenna was designed. This simplified structure consists of a small metallic cavity with a slot on
the side, which mimics the nearest metallic grid in the panel; see
the rectangle labeled with red (dashed) line in Fig. 2(b). This
SOH et al.: DUAL-BAND CAVITY ANTENNA EMBEDDED WITHIN MULTIPLE METALLIC ENCLOSURES
1589
Fig. 3. (a) Metallic enclosure 2, also called bucky: schematic and dimensions
of ME2A (in mm); photo of ME2A (b) and ME2B (c). During operation, the
bucky is slid into the X-ray machine.
Fig. 2. Metallic enclosure 1 (ME1) also called panel: (a) schematic and dimensions (in mm) and (b) photo of the physical structure. The cover closing ME1
from the top is not shown in the photo. The red (dashed) line indicates the
location of the antenna.
1590
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 64, NO. 5, MAY 2015
Fig. 4. (a) Simulated and measured S11 for Ant. 1, (b) measured S11 of nine
fabricated prototypes extracted from different parts of the same substrate sheet.
Fig. 6. Measured radiation patterns for antenna prototype 11 1 at (a) 2.4 and
(b) 5.2 GHz. (Legend: black solid = co-polarized xz plane; red dotted = crosspolarized xz plane; purple dashed = co-polarized yz plane; blue short dash =
cross-polarized yz plane).
SOH et al.: DUAL-BAND CAVITY ANTENNA EMBEDDED WITHIN MULTIPLE METALLIC ENCLOSURES
1591
TABLE I
M EASURED R EALIZED G AIN ( D B)
Fig. 7. (a) Simulated and measured S11 when the antennas are placed inside
slot 1 and slot 2 of ME1. (b) Measured S11 with the same antenna prototype
placed in slots 1 and 2 in ME1 and ME2A/ME2B.
In the upper band, the S11 and BW are about the same as in
Fig. 7(a) in three cases. Only the result for ME2B slot 1 is much
worse. The initial 25% BW is reduced to only 12%. After carefully checking ME2B (the bucky), a metallic fastener was found
in front of slot 1, which partially blocked the antennas radiating slot. On the other hand, the BW in the lower 2.4-GHz band
grows slightly larger regardless of the slot where the antenna
is inserted. A BW of 2%4% is observed when the antenna is
placed into ME2A and ME2B.
The realized gain of the antenna was measured in FS,
and when positioned within ME1 and ME2, respectively; see
Table I. The higher band is clearly more robust than the lower
band, where the antenna is easily influenced by the neighboring
metallic parts. The realized gain for ME2B slot 1 is much lower
than for the other situations. This was caused by the metallic
fastener in front of the radiation slot, as mentioned before.
1592
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 64, NO. 5, MAY 2015
Fig. 9. Two communication test configurations with antenna and module inside
ME box on a trolley: (a) module AWUS036H, the Cisco WLAN router, the
practical indoor test environment, (b) module SparkLAN WUBR-508N, the
router, and practical indoor test environment.
Fig. 8. WiFi module and WICAV antenna in slot 1 of ME1: (a) module
AWUS036H, circulator and attenuators placed in a shielded absorbing box
with the AUT connected and placed in slot 1 of ME1, (b) module SparkLAN
WUBR-508N.
2)
3)
4)
5)
SOH et al.: DUAL-BAND CAVITY ANTENNA EMBEDDED WITHIN MULTIPLE METALLIC ENCLOSURES
TABLE II
C ONFIGURATION 1 (M ODULE AWUS036H), P RACTICAL I NDOOR WLAN
E VALUATION S UMMARY
1593
VI. C ONCLUSION
A novel, dual-band cavity resonator antenna optimized for
operation from inside two metallic enclosures has been proposed for dual-band WLAN operation. Its compact size is
achieved by loading the cavity with dielectric and by integrating a rectangular open-loop resonator to enable resonance at the
lower 2.4-GHz WLAN band. This antenna is fully implemented
on a RO4003C substrate and its cavity walls are formed using
vias. Simulations and measurements for nine antenna prototypes indicated a good agreement. All antennas are operational
with satisfactory reflection coefficients, radiation patterns, and
gains. The final evaluation performed in a room sized at 26
6 m2 with the antenna placed inside the enclosures indicated
proper antenna operation with a maximum link speed of 54
Mb/s for most situations.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
TABLE III
C ONFIGURATIONS 2, M ODULE S PARKLAN W UBR -508N P RACTICAL
I NDOOR W LAN E VALUATION S UMMARY
R EFERENCES
*No means that there was a person standing in between the antennas,
mimicking a realistic situation in an X-ray room.
1594
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 64, NO. 5, MAY 2015
[12] J.-P. Chen and P. Hsu, A compact strip dipole coupled split-ring resonator antenna for RFID tags, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 61,
no. 11, pp. 53725376, Nov. 2013.
[13] Alfa Network Inc. (Nov. 2011). AWUS036H User Guide. Alfa Network
Inc., Taipei City, Taiwan [Online]. Available: http://www.alfa.com.
tw/dl_output.php?ServerFilename=AWUS036H%20User%20Guide.
pdf&ServerFilename1=AWUS036H%20User%20Guide.pdf&sn=37&
token=81ead88a6f473b2bf9028aa0f2c8525d
[14] Microsoft Corporation. (Oct. 2011). How to Troubleshoot Wireless
Network Connections in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Microsoft
Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA [Online]. Available: https://support.
microsoft.com/en-us/kb/870702
[15] Hirose Electric Group. (Oct. 2014). Ultra Small Surface Mount Coaxial
Connectors. Hirose Electric Group, Tokyo, Japan [Online]. Available:
https://www.hirose.co.jp/cataloge_hp/ed_UFL_20141014.pdf
[16] Cisco Systems, Inc. (2012). Cisco Aironet 1140 Series Access Point
Datasheet [Online]. Available: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/
870702