Rotman Lens-Based Circular Array for Generating Five-mode OAM Radio Beams

Recently, vortex beam carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) for radio communications has attracted much attention for its potential of transmitting multiple signals simultaneously at the same frequency, which can be used to increase the channel capacity. However, most of the methods for getting multi-mode OAM radio beams remain up to now mainly at simulation level, since their implementations are of complicated structure and very high cost. This paper provides an effective design of generating five-mode OAM radio beams by using the Rotman lens-fed antenna array. The Rotman lens is a viable beamforming approach instead of electronically scanned arrays for its low cost and the ease of implementation. The lens-fed array employs a two-layer structure for size reduction, and the lens body and the antenna array are segregated by a common ground plane to eliminate spurious radiation and thus improve the performance of the OAM beams. The measured results coincide with the simulated ones, which verified the effectiveness of the proposed design for generating multi-mode OAM beams.