An ESPAR Antenna for Beamspace-MIMO Systems Using PSK Modulation Schemes

In this paper the use of electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) antennas is introduced for achieving increased spectral efficiency characteristics in multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) systems using a single active element, and compact antennas. The proposed ESPAR antenna is capable of mapping phase-shift-keying (PSK) modulated symbols to be transmitted onto orthogonal basis functions on the wavevector domain of the multi-element antenna (MEA), instead of the traditional approach of sending different symbol streams in different locations on the antenna domain. In this way, different symbols are transmitted simultaneously towards different angles of departure at the transmitter side. We show that the proposed system, called beamspace-MIMO (BS-MIMO) can achieve performance characteristics comparable to traditional MIMO systems while using a single radio-frequency (RF) front-end and ESPAR antenna arrays of total length equal to lambda/8, for popular PSK modulation schemes such as binary-PSK (BPSK), quaternary-PSK (QPSK), as well as for their offset-PSK and differential-PSK variations.