60GHz metallic-rectangular-grooves based reflectarray antenna illuminated by an E-plane sectoral horn feeder

There have been developed a lot of applications such as broadband radio links for cellular base station backhaul networking, imaging to display weapons and non-metal objects, and 60 GHz Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) in the millimeter (mm) wave band [1]-[2]. Especially 70- and 80-GHz communication systems within 1-mile distance will play an important role in the next-generation wireless network because the cell site connectivity will demand over 1Gbps data rates. In these bands, highly directional and high gain antenna is needed to compensate for the high free space path loss and not to cause interference. Conventional high gain antennas most often used are parabolic reflectors. Although parabolic reflectors are highly efficient antennas, they are generally bulky in size. Nowadays various flat reflectarray antennas have been presented for the profile size reduction as compared to conventional parabola antennas. Modern planar reflectarrays [3]-[4] have been mainly manufactured by small metallic patched on a dielectric substrate. However the main drawbacks in the development of a planar reflectarray are its narrow bandwidth and lower efficiency. Recently we have proposed metallic-grooves based reflectarray antenna [5] in order to improve bandwidth of a reflectarray antenna illuminated by an open-ended parallel plate waveguide feeder using an overlapping T-block method [6]. In this paper, the performances of antenna gain versus the aperture sizes of feeder for the proposed 2-dimensional antenna are simulated and compared.