Analysis of 5G Rotman beamforming lens antenna for higher beam angle and minimum phase error

Abstract

Rotman lens beamforming networks are widely used for high gain, wide bandwidth applications in 5G communication. The uniform amplitude and phase distribution along with wide angle scanning at the array ports are mostly demanded for reducing the losses. Furthermore, minimum phase error is essential requirement for lens designs. Conventionally, for wide angle scanning, the lenses are designed by using most common expression between beam angle α and focal ratio (parameter ‘g’) i.e. g = 1 + 0.5α ². The lenses obtained by such relation are inefficient for higher beam angle such as α = 45° due to the restricted shapes of beam and array contours. Hence suffer with large path length error limitation. In this paper, the mathematical relation between beam angle and focal ratio (parameter ‘g’) has been developed. The proposed relation offers phase error reduction more than 3× than the conventional expression based lens error. The simulation of the designed lens has performed using Software MATLAB which showed close agreement with the analytical values. Furthermore, three rectangular MPA arrays at center frequency 2.35 GHz have been proposed and simulated with lens design for 5G frequency range i.e. 2.3–2.4 GHz and offer high gain, directivity and wide coverage.