Beam-steering Surface Wave Fluid Antennas for MIMO Applications

This paper proposed to use surface wave fluid antennas to realize beam-steering functionality and spatial diversity for MIMO applications. By utilizing the advantage of the non-radiating feature of surface wave propagation, in contrast to the conventional multiple RF input ports approach reported, the proposed design only required one RF input to achieve the spatial diversity. The surface wave fluid antenna is designed to work in the millimeter-wave frequency band from 20 to 26.5 GHz. The preliminary results show that the radiation direction of the antenna can be controlled by changing the position of the fluid metal radiator.