Developments on polarization reconfigurable magneto-electric dipole antennas  (Invited)

Superior performances such as wideband, symmetric radiation patterns, low back radiation and stable gain have made the magneto-electric (ME) dipole attractive to researchers and engineers, especially for the base station antenna designs. On the other hand, reconfigurable antenna has received a wide range of interests as it provides agility in antenna characteristics like polarization, operation frequency and radiation pattern. In this paper, we present the recent developments in polarization reconfigurable ME dipoles, and in particular we discuss a high-efficiency tri-polarization reconfigurable and a single-port quad-polarization reconfigurable designs. Compared to conventional polarization reconfigurable antennas that are based on microstrip antennas, the proposed polarization reconfigurable ME dipole antennas have a wide overlapped bandwidth, symmetric radiation and stable gain. By utilizing new techniques such as the low-loss reconfigurable perturbation as well as the cross-dipole feeding structure, a high antenna efficiency or less feeding port without complex biasing network can be realized. Potential application of these antennas can be found in future high data-rate, energy-conservation and intelligent wireless communication systems.