Analysis and Optimization of a Very Compact MPA with Parasitic Elements for Inter-swarm of CubeSats Communications

Works on CubeSat Satellites (CubeSats) have gained momentum recently because of its fabrication using commercial off-the-shelf components. Another advantage of CubeSats is that they can form swarms to interact with each other via cross-link communications to carry out different functions such as enhancing the contact time with base stations and provide redundancy. These capabilities require high gain, wide bandwidth and low-profile antenna to establish the cross-link communications between the CubeSats and ground stations. Henceforth, this paper proposes high gain and miniaturized Microstrip Patch Antenna (MPA). The key idea is to use parasitic element technique to enhance the proposed antenna gain and performance without increasing its physical size. The proposed antenna was evaluated using ANSYS HFSS. The results revealed that our parasitic antenna attained enhanced gain of 7.2 dBi, ultra-wideband of 5750 MHz (25.35–31.19 GHz), and a high return loss (RL) at our targeting frequency of 28.7 GHz. The experimental results confirm that the optimized antenna gives a RL of 18.0 dB and a suitable impedance BW for Inter-Swarm communications.