Polarization Insensitive Sensing for Direction of Arrival by Programmable Metasurface

ABSTRACT

We propose a new design of polarization insensitive sensing for Direction of Arrival (DoA) achieved by programmable metasurface with independent control of dynamic phase under dual‐polarization. The unit cell of metasurface is constructed by multi‐layer structure mainly including one dual‐polarization patch for receiving of spatial electromagnetic (EM) signal with any polarization and two programmable phase shifters for each polarization. All of the EM power collected from each unit cell will be concentrated by one power‐combining network integrated in the middle layer of metasurface to acquire the total receiving signal corresponding to each polarization. Accordingly, the spatial sensing matrix composed of diverse receiving patterns can be generated by randomly controlling the programmable phase shift in each unit cell, and the DoA estimation will be actualized by utilizing the compressive sensing method due to the information received from each polarized port. One prototype of metasurface is fabricated and measured, the DoA estimation in the azimuth plane of single source and two sources under different polarization states have been solved precisely under the center frequency of 4.8 GHz with a relative bandwidth of 8%.