Metamaterials and Their Application in the Performance Enhancement of Reconfigurable Antennas: A Review

Metamaterials exhibit properties in terms of subwavelength operation or phase manipulation, among others, that can be used in a variety of applications in 5G communication systems. The future and current 5G devices demand high efficiency, high data rate, computational capabilities, cost-effectiveness, compact size, and low power consumption. This variation and advancement are possible when the antenna design is revised to operate over wideband, high gain, and multiband and has characteristics of compact size, reconfiguration, absorption, and simple ease of fabrication. The materials loaded with antennas or, in the same cases, without antennas, offer the aforementioned characteristics to bring advancement in order to facilitate users. A number of works on designing metasurfaces capable of improving bandwidth, gain efficiency, and reducing the size and cost of antennas are available in the literature for this purpose. Not only are these applications possible, but the intelligent metasurfaces are also designed to obtain reconfiguration in terms of frequency and polarization. The number of absorbers loaded with metamaterials is also designed to improve the absorption percentage used for radar applications. Thus, in this paper, the general overview of different types of metamaterials and their role in performance enhancement and application in 5G and 6G communication systems is discussed.