On the miniaturazation of Cylindrical Omnidirectional slotted waveguide antennas for wireless applications

Antennas are becoming crucial in an increasingly growing number of vital applications, particularly with the emergence of the 3G and 4G generations of communications. Point-to-multipoint configuration is a major interest nowadays; therefore antennas are designed for this purpose where efficiency, size, and cost play a decisive role. The common practice is to refer to the already existing antennas in the market for this sole purpose. Nonetheless, a major drawback of such solutions is that the aforementioned criteria are extremely hard to simultaneously optimize. The purpose of this project is to present a new configuration relying on the use of Slotted Circular Waveguide Antennas, which are initially used in Radar applications, as an ultimate alternative that allows drastically enhancing the ratio of performance versus cost. Moreover, the antenna will be remodeled and designed to function as an enhanced Circular Slotted Waveguide Antenna with optimized directional characteristics with gain above 10 dBi (to be considered as high gain). Simulation results were carried out at 2.4 GHz frequency and indubitably demonstrated high effectiveness in terms of directivity and high gain given a reduced cost, shape and size. A prototype was fabricated to measure its parameters and compare them with simulation results. It is still noteworthy to mention that these results matched with an elevated accuracy since the pattern simulated is meshed and modeled to a far extent taking into account all non-ideal characteristics.