2015 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Research (ICTRC2015)
Single Layer Polarization Independent Reflectarray
Antenna for Future 5G Cellular Applications
Rania Elsharkawy1, A.-R. Sebak2, Moataza Hindy1, Osama M. Haraz3, 4, Adel Saleeb5, El-Sayed M. El-Rabaie5
1 2 3 4
Electronics ECE Department Electrical Engineering
Research Institute Concordia University Dept., Assiut University
Dokki, Giza, Montreal, Quebec, Assiut 71515, Egypt
Egypt. Canada
E-mails: raniarefaat85@eri.edu.eg, abdo@ece.concordia.ca, m1_hendi@eri.edu.eg, osama.haraz@eng.au.edu.eg,
adel48saleeb@menoufia.edu.eg, srabie1@menoufia.edu.eg
Abstract—This paper presents a reflectarray antenna
working at 28 GHz with polarization independent characteristics.
The unit cell is composed of three circular rings optimized to
achieve linear phase characteristics with the variation of the unit
cell size. The array is composed of 400 unit cells of variable size
arranged in a square shape aperture in order to direct the
reflected wave in a direction normal to the reflectarray surface.
The simulation results of the array with CST software show a
directive beam with a low side lobe level, a gain of about 25 dB,
and an efficiency of 58% at 28 GHz, which makes this array
suitable for 5-G applications that may work at 28 GHz.
Keywords—Polarization independant; reflectarray antenna;
fifth generation (5G) cellular.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, printed-circuit technology has helped in the
emergence of microstrip reflectarray antennas. On contrary to
reflector antennas, microstrip reflectarrays enjoy light weight,
high efficiency, and compact size [1,2]. The microstrip
reflectarray is a quasi-periodic structure of repetitive unit cells
with variable specifications. In polarization independence
cases, these variable specifications are represented with
variable size of the unit cell. The objective of varying the unit
cell size is to achieve different phase shifts in order to obtain
collimated beams [1,2].
A popular approach for the design of reflectarrays adopts
the use of design curves, which relate the radiated field phase
to a pre-specified design parameter [1,2]. For polarization
independence, a parameter representing the unit cell size can be
used. The design curves are obtained in a training mode, in
which the design parameter for a single unit cell is varied and
the reflection phase is estimated at discrete points. After that,
these design curves are used to get the appropriate value of the
design parameter required to achieve a certain phase at each
position in order to build the whole array.
Circular rings are frequently used in reflectarray antennas.
Li et al. presented an X-band reflectarray composed of 81
elements. The unit cell in this array consists of two rings. It is a
polarization independent array [3]. Kalil et al. presented an
Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) reflectarray antenna for tag
localization in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
978-1-4799-8966-9/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 9
5
KACST-TIC in Faculty of Electronic
RFTONICS, King Saud Engineering, Menoufia
University University
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Menouf, 32952, Egypt.
applications. This array consists of unit cells with two circular
rings [4]. It works at 2.2 GHz. The array consists of 10×10 unit
cells, and it achieved a high gain pencil beam. Han et al. built a
circular polarized high-gain X/Ka band reflectarray composed
of two layers with varying elements [5]. Their unit cell is
composed of a fixed-size single open-ring. The phase
adaptation in the different unit cells is performed with the
rotation of open rings. Bialkowski et al. investigated the use of
circular and square rings in the unit cells [6]. They proved that
circular rings give better phase responses than square rings in
terms of linearity. In addition, they proved that the use of a
single ring may not achieve the required 360 phase range.
This problem can be solved either with the incorporation of a
Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) or the addition of another
ring.
This paper presents a proposal to solve this problem with
three circular rings. Each ring resonates at a certain frequency
leading to a wide bandwidth structure. The rest of this paper is
organized as follows. Section II, discusses the reflectarray
design rules. Section III, presents the unit cell structure.
Section IV, gives the reflectarray specifications. Section V,
gives the simulation results. The concluding remarks are given
in section VI.
II. REFLECTARRAY DESIGN RULES
Based on the required operating frequency, bandwidth,
polarization, loss, and cost, the array design parameters are set.
The main parameter that governs the array aperture size is the
required antenna gain. The size of the unit cell, shown in Fig.
(1), is a key factor that determines the inter-element spacing,
and hence guarantees avoidance of grating lobes. The
parameters of the structure in Fig. (1) have been obtained
through an optimization process with CST to obtain linear
phase.
Another important factor is the focal length of the array (F).
This focal length should be selected to guarantee an edge taper
of 10 dB illumination at the edges of the reflectarray [7]. The
F/D ratio governs also the spillover and taper efficiencies of the
reflectarray [8].The shape of the unit cell is used to determine
the type of polarization required. In this work, an infinite array
approach was adopted for the design, but with variable size
 2015 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Research (ICTRC2015)

patches, and each patch should satisfy the following formula shown in Fig. 1. All the three combined elements in the unit
[1]: cell are resonating at three closely spaced frequencies to
increase the bandwidth; and their dimensions are adjusted for
𝑘𝑜 (𝑅𝑖 − ⃗𝑟𝑖 ∙ 𝑟̂𝑏 ) − 𝛾𝑖 = 2𝑁𝜋 (1) the maximum linear phase response versus the radius R. The
where 𝑘𝑜 is the free-space wavenumber, 𝑅𝑖 is the distance
from the phase center of the feed to the center of reflectarray
element 𝑖, 𝑟⃗𝑖 is the position vector to the center of the
reflectarray element from the reflectarray surface center, 𝑟̂𝑏 is
the unit vector in the collimated beam direction, 𝑁 is an
integer, and 𝛾𝑖 is the 𝑖th element phase as shown in Fig (2). The
phase shifts from identical elements are computed, and this is
repeated for different patch sizes to create a dictionary of sizes

Fig. 2 Array geometry with illumination.

-0.02

-0.04

-0.06
Reflection loss/dB

-0.08

-0.1

-0.12

-0.14

-0.16
25 25.5 26 26.5 27 27.5 28 28.5 29 29.5 30
Frequency/GHz
(a)
0

-0.1

-0.2

-0.3
Reflection loss/dB

Fig. 1 Unit cell configuration of the reflectarray. The dimensions of unit -0.4
cell are all in mm, 𝑃𝑥 = 𝑃𝑦 = 10.7/2, 𝑅1 = 𝑅 − 𝑔, 𝑅2 = 𝑅1 − 𝑔 − 𝑊𝑐1
-0.5
,𝑊𝑐1 = 0.2, 𝑊𝑐2 = 0.1714, 𝑊𝑠 = 0.086, 𝑔 = 0.214, ℎ𝑠 = 1.6 and 𝜀𝑟 =
2.2 ( Rogers RT 5880). -0.6

-0.7

and phases to build an array of patches with different sizes -0.8

satisfying Eq. (1) at each patch location. This guarantees a -0.9

fixed phase delay for radiation coming back from each element -1
and hence phase collimation. 1.6 1.65 1.7 1.75 1.8 1.85 1.9 1.95 2
R/mm
(b)
III. UNIT CELL STRUCTURE Fig. 3 Reflection loss versus frequency and size.

The proposed unit cell in this paper is designed to work

around 28 GHz. It is a single layer unit cell to decrease both 10% and 20% achieved bandwidths are 665MHZ and 998MHz,
cost and fabrication complexity. It is designed to be respectively as shown in Fig (3-a) which indicates the
polarization independent by containing three circular rings as reflection loss curve versus frequency. Fig (3-b) reveals that

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 2015 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Research (ICTRC2015)

the reflection loss is approximately constant with the variation

of the unit cell size in the margin that gives a phase shift of
360. Hence, the total loss is independent of the unit cell size.
The dimensions of the unit cell are optimized for linear phase

(a) E-plane

(a)

(b) H-plane
Fig. 5 Radiation pattern of the RA antenna from 25 GHz to 30 GHz..
(b)
Fig. 4 The reflection phase response of the unit cell in case of (a) TM-
incidence, (b) TE-incidence.

variation for both TE- and TM-polarized waves incident at

angles up to 30°.
The variation of the simulated phases of the reflection
coefficient with R in Fig. 4 shows a good linearity and
insensitivity to polarization.

IV. REFLECTARRAY SPECIFICATIONS

The array is composed of 400 unit cells with area 10×
10. The maximum unit cell size is /2 ×/2. Center feeding is
used at 10from the array surface such that the F/D ratio is
1.The array is fed with a pyramidal horn having aperture
dimensions of (14×12.4×25) mm with WR28 waveguide. The Fig. 6 Realized gain of the RA antenna over the frequency band.
realized horn gain is 12.1 dB at the frequency of 28 GHz. Its E-
and H-plane half-power beam-widths are 43.8° and 48.2°,
respectively.

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 2015 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Research (ICTRC2015)

V. SIMULATION RESULTS VI. CONCLUSIONS

This paper presented a polarization independent and
economical reflectarray antenna suitable for 5-G mobile
applications. This array has been built based on the infinite
array approximation approach with variable-size unit cells.
Simulation results revealed high gain-bandwidth product. The
designed array uses unit cells of several rings resonating at
closely spaced frequencies. This design achieves linear
behavior of the phase versus size in a range of 360o. In
addition, the designed array achieves high efficiency and low
side-lobe levels.
REFERENCES
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[2] C. Balanis, Antenna Theory Analysis and Design 3rd edition, A John
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[3] Y. Li, M. E. Bialkowski, K. H. Sayidmarie, N. V. Shuley, “ 81-Element
Fig. 7 S-parameters of the RA antenna from 25 GHz to 30 GHz.. Single-layer Reflectarray with Double-ring Phasing Elements for
Wideband Applications,” IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society
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[4] M. Khaliel, A. Fawky, M. El-Hadidy, T. Kaiser, “ UWB Reflectarray
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Frequency Efficiency HPBW HPBW [5] C. Han ; J. Huang, K. Chang, “ A high efficiency Offset-fed X/ka-dual-
plane plane %
(GHz) E-plane H-Plane band Reflectarray Using Thin Membranes,” IEEE Transactions on
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[7] E. R. F. Almajali, ”Reflectarray Antennas : Operating Mechanisms, and
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29 -14.4 -14.9 60.86 5.2 5 [9] CST-Computer Simulation Technology, Documentation. Available
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30 -15.3 -16.4 63.06 5.1 4.9

The CST Microwave studio [9] has been used to obtain the
simulation results in Figs. (5) to (7) in the frequency band
extending from 25 to 30 GHz. These results ensure the low
side-lobe level for the E- and H-planes over the whole
frequency band of interest. Also, it is noticed that the
reflectarray gain has a value of approximately 25 dB over the
frequency range from 25 to 28 GHz and it gets increased in the
rest of the frequency band of interest, which is a desired
behavior over the whole 5 GHz BW. The reflection coefficient
magnitude in Fig.(7) is always below -10 dB allover the band
from 25 to 30 GHz. Table (1) gives a summary of the SLL,
efficiency, and beam width values at different frequencies.
These results reveal high values of efficiency at all frequencies
in the band of interest.

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